23-10-20 Xina's PLAN Expansion vs USN's Hegemony - gtbt > . skip > .
Amphibous challenges WW2
Wakey, wakey, West ....
Chinese children also study “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, which has two chapters, “Terrain” and “The Nine Situations,” that deal with strategic topography. In 2015, the text became required reading in junior high schools. Some publishers have put out an illustrated version for 7- to 14-year-olds.
The 14th-century novel “Romance of The Three Kingdoms,” which chronicles the wars of the third century, is one of China’s most popular fictional texts, especially among young people — and it has inspired competitive internet games that involve attacking and defending critical choke points.
The next generation is being reared to be no less strategic in its thinking than the previous ones.
Yet even analysts who fear the Chinese Communist Party’s global aspirations have underestimated some of its inroads. Western governments have been on to China’s hard-power geopolitical-choke-point strategy. But they are only just beginning to appreciate its far more invasive soft-power strategy — and it might already be too late.
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China’s move to establish physical footholds around the world is easy enough to recognize as evidence of a coherent game plan, in part because those perches are readily marked on a map and because other major powers positioned themselves in much the same way in the past. Beijing has also bragged about these projects — and its intentions — by giving them grand monikers like the Belt and Road Initiative.
Not so with its soft-power ambitions, whose growth has been much less noticed — at least until UNpresident Idiot-in-Chief started picking a fight with Beijing. And yet these are much more intrusive, and potentially far more dangerous.
The Chinese government is essentially forward-deploying and setting up various outposts within the United States and other developed democratic countries, in classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms.
