All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).
Coal share is shrinking, a lot.
Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.
I actually went to changji before, and visited my friend’s brother furniture factory, so they have manufacturing in Xinjiang. They have more potential for it than any other western province if we go by culture since Uighurs are just as industrious and educated as Han (economic competition is where a lot of the conflict stems from, if they could fix that the autonomous region would boom).
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
>Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users.
That’s the x thing is higher in higher population areas problem. You have to calculate the probability of your bike being stolen if you have a bike. So not bike thefts per capita but bike thefts per bike owner.
It is outrageously expensive.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
[0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc... [1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...
> It is outrageously expensive.
Quite the opposite.
> Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy...
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
About the quality I expected.
> The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong.
Were does it suggests that? The number 118 doesn't appear anywhere in that document.
> Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Where do you get these numbers from?
> carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera)
I do all grocery shopping for a family of four with a cargo bike. I pick up and drop off children in the cargo bike. You can think up objections all day if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that some people succeed in living car-free.
Nobody is forcing you to take a bicycle. Even if you personally don't like cycling, you should still encourage others to: every cyclist you see riding around is one less car stuck in traffic with you.
> And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
Then you're in luck. On page 24, they include a budget of 117 EUR for gear and accessories.
I'm really sorry, my comment was meant to respond to nehal3m (a link to a thesis), not your comment.
I understand that biking can work and there are people that benefit greatly. Having a cargo-bike suggests you are an outlier. I've used biking and bussing as my main mode of transport in the past.
I just prefer we are truthful and admit that it is expensive to put down a bike lane. The paper you linked mentions the expense.
That paper is strongly biased towards cycling - hardly a fair analysis. It notes the same argument as the other paper "Total costs of ownership for a bicycle range between 16 and 28 eurocents per kilometre, while an average passenger car costs easily 32 eurocents per kilometre. Bicycles can play a key role in inclusive mobility policies.".
Comparisons need to be between trips not per km since a bicycle usually cannot fully substitute for a car.
And it is just a true that cars play a key role in inclusive mobility policies; however they don't mention that eh. I had a disabled parent so I do see both sides.
Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.
This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
> There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere
Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work!
It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through.
Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc.
New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including:
- Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million.
- Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k)
- M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M.
- Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k).
- Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k).
- Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k).
Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_U...
> Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities
The national road agency NZTA in New Zealand is mostly paid for by fuel taxes and car/truck taxes. It is reasonably fair - approximately user-pays. You can find expensive roading upgrades (similar to your examples) but they are mostly paid for by car and truck users.
Local government taxes in New Zealand are dependent on property values, so AFAIK the wealthy generally subsidise the poorer. Low density suburbs are usually high value properties and they pay quite a lot more in taxes. The more rural areas are often in different council areas than Christchurch City Council - I don't think there is cross-subsidy for commuters.
> not that expensive to put down a bike lane
Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
> Who said net zero?
OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary.
Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.
> Not in addition to
Interesting. I didn't read that at all, but now this conversation makes a little more sense.
But suggesting bike lanes, not positioned as an replacement to cars, is a great idea.
Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport.
At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.
Think roads, not cars.
I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.
Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.
I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem.
Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance.
We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free.
I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.
Replacing most of car traffic in a city with public transport (and bikes and such) is possible, and it can work - after it stabilizes. The transition seems extremely disruptive, which might be why people speak of it as if it couldn't work.
I'm a parent with small children. We have a car, but we only use it for inter-city commute. Everything within city bounds, we handle by public transit or walking (or electric scooters). It works because we live close to the kindergarten, and close to multiple public transit hubs, and I work remotely. It works, because we planned for it in advance.
Now, take a typical car-commuting, office-working parent of today. Like most, the place they live in is frozen in some balance between their and their spouses' jobs. Changing it would upend someone's schedule, and possibly involve kids changing schools/neighbourhoods (which isn't good for them). At that stage in life, one's combination of home, workplace, kids schools and after-school activities, is pretty much frozen in place. If they made it work with car commute, it probably can't work with public transit, and thus if you suggest the change, they'll look at you as if you came from Mars or something.
That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.
Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.
Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
Credible reduction in car dependence needs well connected fast passenger rail networks, and changing urban sprawl to something denser with more local amenities.
The first one is a major infrastructure project, the latter is largely unpopular with the people already living there (and Republicans react to the concept of 15-minute cities like it was a gulag).
Infrastructure is still built as if it was business as usual, so can easily get blocked and delayed by decades on budgeting, bidding, consultations, NIMBYs, environmental surveys, etc.
OTOH we've already got EVs, we have already been building infrastructure for them, and it's a smaller change more acceptable to people.
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
There is a downside.
You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket.
(or use an app which does this for you.)
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...
BYD also have some kind of monorail product!
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.
I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.
Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.
>Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
150cm-tall women here in Tokyo have no trouble with all of the above on a bicycle. If they can do it, so can you. They have e-bikes with child seats and cargo baskets, and they wear rain gear when it's raining.
I ride my bike a lot, but in fact need a car where I live if I want to go 10 miles in less than an hour. This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either. Biking on the street with high speed traffic is not safe here, regardless of your height.
Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in. I’m really inspired by the new developments in my area. After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better.
I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited. I’ve tried to retain some of the sensibilities I observed there, and incorporate them into my lifestyle. Amsterdam similarly inspired me to revisit my lifestyle. If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!
>I ride my bike a lot, but in fact need a car where I live if I want to go 10 miles in less than an hour.
That's fair; I was simply addressing the other objections (weather, cargo, additional people (presumably children)). The women riding on mamachari here aren't riding 16 kilometers AFAICT, but they don't need to because things are generally close together, and for longer trips, people park their bikes at the station and use the train/subway.
>This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either.
I completely disagree: you might not like it, but my observation is that most Americans prefer their car-centric society just the way it is. The recent election reinforces this.
>Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in.
Sorry, but this seems like total fantasy. The new administration is not interested in promoting walkability or cycling, nor are the majority of the electorate that voted for them. There's probably a few isolated places like you describe, but to ascribe this to the whole country is terribly naive.
>After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better.
I saw that too, in the affluent blue city I lived in at the time. They reopened the road to car traffic after the worst of the pandemic was over, and things went back to the way they were.
>I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited.
Yep, I thought so too, so after the pandemic restrictions were lifted, I decided to find a job and move here because I could see things in America were going downhill, and honestly hadn't enjoyed living in America much in the last 20 years or so, especially since 2016. The recent election proved me right. It's not fun seeing what's going on in America lately, but it's a lot easier and less stressful seeing it from a distance than having to live in it, as I did during the pandemic. Never again.
>If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!
Or instead of tilting at windmills, find a place you like better and just go there, if you can. After all, that's how America itself was built decades and centuries ago. Of course, this isn't the right answer for everyone, but for me it was.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
or a bus.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
Where they're currently building drones.
In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.
I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.
Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.
The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?
Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.
South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.
Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.
Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.
China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.
China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
It's so funny to read stuff like this and compare it to the united states which during my lifetime has invaded so many different countries and killed countless people across the world. Not saying China is great, but come on man if you had to pick one country that is invasion happy it's not china...
If you had to pick one country that is invasion happy it's not China.
Its regime is somewhat conservative in this regard, but happily orders of invasions of other countries when it sees the need.
Can you think of another country that actually does more invasions all the time in recent history?
You can ask all the rhetorical questions you want.
I just don't see a need for pretensions that China does not cynically invade countries on occasion, or similar nonsense.
The death toll on two of the interventions above (2M+ each for Korea/Cambodia), BTW.
Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.
Hong Kong was leased from China. No invasion necessary.
They've squashed the democracy movement there, though.
I'm not saying they're not trying to expand their sphere of influence. I just think they're not quite as gung-ho about it as western powers. They work slower and less aggressively, invasions are a last resort.
Now do Tibet.
75 years ago? If that's the closest precedent you can find, that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Can you name a single country that China has brought democracy to?
Now we're shifting topics. We're talking about invasions, not bringing democracy.
I also don't think that "bringing democracy" is a universal good, if you look at the US' exploits in the Middle East.
It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.
When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.
Keep in mind that he is now surrounded by a completely different people than during his first term.