https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-visa-free-travel-policies-complete-guide/

that's right, gonna have to turn that exploitation way up

yeah it kinda borders slave labor

I have little hope for things getting better in the west during my lifetime, but I'm very optimistic for the rest of humanity. We already see the grip of the empire slipping everywhere now, and this will only accelerate in the coming years.

lol right, they'd basically have to stop being American

Given Blinken's recent statements, I'm guessing the plan going forward is to start blaming China for everything.

😄

I do think they genuinely hoped to break Russia up at the start of this, but also agree that there are plenty of secondary goals. Making sure Europe doesn't become economically integrated with the east, and funnelling money to the oligarchs who own the war industry are two obvious goals US is currently achieving.

Exactly, there's no path towards turning things around politically. I think the last chance to save capitalism was the whole green new deal thing that Sanders was pushing. These were minimally necessary changes to arrest the decline, and the establishment soundly rejected that idea. So, we know for a fact that it's not possible to do anything differently.

RAND tends to be fairly sober all things considered. I think the interesting part of the study is the admission that there isn't really a clear path towards arresting the decline.

yeah, but a bag of screws doesn't cost 90k for the Russian military

oh nice find!

pushing people into military is almost certainly a part of it too, but that's just a different flavor of prison slavery

yeah was a surprisingly good read

So the plan is to create mass homelessness, then incarcerate the homeless and use them as slave labor to offeset the cost of doing labor in US?

It’s not about removing supply chain inputs. The US has no near term plans to cut off reliance on Chinese chemicals or other industrial inputs. However those are low value.

I don't agree with that at all. What China produces is absolutely not low value inputs. In fact, as the article notes, many of these are very specialized inputs that only China can produce effectively today.

I agree that US is trying to do protectionism to allow their own industries to compete. However, the reality is that US isn't that big of a market of itself. China is the biggest trading partner for most countries in the world now, and Chinese companies produce cheaper and better goods than American ones at all levels of supply chain. There's no real way US can compete with that. US can try to slow China's growth, but it's not possible to do that without slowing US growth down even more.

What I expect China to do is to keep building out projects like BRICS and the BRI. China is already doing more trade with the developing world than the west, and this trade will only accelerate. Russia is another big factor because decoupling from the west opened a huge market for Chinese companies.

US can try to form a bloc around G7, but it's going to be economically inferiors to BRICS. So, what we'll see with cold war 2 is the reverse of the situation during the first one. On top of that, Europe will likely be forced to overinvest in its military once Russia wins in Ukraine. This is going to be a huge economic drain on the west.

😄

yup, but that's ok because the west is on their side

I haven't really followed to be honest, maybe it's a more broad ban now?