Quote:
Originally Posted by FlameOn
Take for example, the whole Spy Balloon incident. Publicly, the Chinese were pushing for a de-escalation with the US encouraging a state visit with Antony Blinken, but at the same time they sent a huge 3 bus length wide Spy Balloon covered in SIGINT equipment, that changed course to go over US nuclear military installations, while constantly falsely claiming that the balloon was civilian in nature w/ no ability to steer and covered under international regulations meant for "light <6kg" weather balloons. They claim they want peace in the Asia Pacific, but blockaded Taiwan, criticize South Korea and Japan for increasing their military budgets when China had been ramping up spending and their power projection abilities for more than two decades. Now they are publicly pushing a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine, while at the same time preparing to sell arms to Russia based on American and German intelligence reports. They claim to be neutral in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but sign a "treaty of unlimited friendship" with Russia almost right after Russia invaded. It's probably why Ursula von der Leyen of the EU stated that we should be skeptical of the Chinese peace plan because overall they have not been at all neutral in this conflict.
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Fair enough, but I have the following comments:
- US spies on everyone all the time. Just like every superpower. They also all deny it, and pretend to get mad when the other guy gets caught spying on them. It's just superpowers being superpowers.
- China waving it's dick around Taiwan isn't in itself particularly out of the ordinary.
- Whenever a country increases their military budgets, everyone they might use that military against is going to say "that's bad don't do that". It's just what happens all the time, I don't see it as related to basically anything, and just gets blown up in news because of the overall international situation.
- Again, China is not sanctioning Russia. They can sell weapons if they want. The arms trade market has warmed up a lot, and China wants a piece. Additionally, if you look at it from China's perspective how is the US donating weapons to Ukraine and selling them to everyone not prolonging the war and escalating tension, yet China selling weapons IS prolonging the war?
If China starts
donating weapons to Russia (or selling them on the cheap), that would be a story, but currently almost all of what you're listing is just China pretty much operating on a "business as usual" basis.
That treaty of friendship... That I can't really comment on, I don't know what it actually means in practice, and does look bad.