cat v china

Move over Garfield; the cartoon cat that broke open Chinese censorship of the covid lockdowns in 2022.

A Chinese dissident - who is behind a popular X account fronted by this cartoon cat - says Beijing is trying to silence him source BBC

A Chinese dissident - who is behind a popular X account fronted by this cartoon cat - says Beijing is trying to silence him:Mr Li has since become a vital chronicler of information deemed politically sensitive by Beijing.

His X account is a window into Xi Jinping’s China where authorities’ vice-like grip on information keeps tightening. From major protests to small acts of dissent, corruption to crime, it is zealously scrubbed off the Chinese internet, only to turn up on Mr Li’s account.

read the whole thing. From the BBC

 ------------------------------

 another report on China from StrategyPage notes the problem of corruption in the military, shoddy workmanship in manufacturing weapons etc. could mean these weapons would fail if they invaded Taiwan.

 the dirty little secret is if they invade Taiwan, the result will cause the Chinese economy to collapse, a world wide depression because of economic sanctions and the loss of Taiwan's computer chips.,

The Chinese government’s 2023 discovery of the disastrous degree to which corruption crippled China’s military capability may have led it to abandon its objective of conquering Taiwan.

The government is acutely aware that its imminent disastrous demographic collapse allows it only a relatively short window of opportunity to conquer Taiwan and achieve great power status.

Abandonment of the Taiwan conquest objective might have also entailed a more realistic assessment of other matters, notably blockade by the US Navy.

 I tend to believe reports from StrategyPage because they get things correct on countries where I have personal knowledge of what is actually going on (as opposed to what the MSM reports).

The shoddyness of Chinese goods here is notorious: They are all over the place here because they are cheap and the poor can't afford anything else. 

and another problem with shoddy cheap Chinese goods in the market: local businesses have trouble competing. 

but for the growing middle class here, if you want medicines, tools, clothing, pipes, cement etc. that are of decent quality, you buy at markets that get the supplies from Japan or the USA.

Right now, China is threatening the sea lanes in the West Philippine sea, which they claim they own. 

By building artificial islands there, they could threaten other Asian countries by blocking the sea lanes, the air lanes, and the internet that go by their artificial islands.

(international court say they don't own it, but hey no one pays attention to the international court). 

Duterte tried to make nice with them, but they screwed him, so now Marcos Jr. is back to trusting the Yanks. 

so every day we hear China complaining about those Nasty Philippine fishermen or aggression by the Coast Guard when the Philippines does what they have been doing in the area for a couple of centuries.

The fact that China is not popular here complicates matters for China, since the northern Philippines is not far from Taiwan, and now the Philippines is allowing the US to put soldiers in the local bases. 

The US is not there to fight, but to supply the latest technology if anything happens and China attacks Taiwan or (hopefully not) Luzon.

Which is why I posted about drones a couple days ago.