China is the world’s second biggest producer of silver and seventh largest producer of nickel. Bonus is that the biggest producer of nickel is Indonesia, which has a free trade agreement with China and the third biggest producer is Russia (lol, lmao).
Also love the example of Sorghum because China is producer #8 in the world and 4 of the top producers are global south countries that absolutely would not cut off trade with China. Also, lmao at the thought of the CPC just collapsing because people can’t get one specific type of liquor. Imagine Russia trying to undermine America by targeting its strategic vodka supply.
All this tells me is that the West doesn’t produce anything that is irreplaceable to China and that the think tankers and journalists are too delusional to recognize this.
I just realized that solar panels and batteries are both key components to decarbonization, so these ghouls are proposing boiling the planet alive so that they can retain their hegemony in the smouldering ruins.
China is very heavily invested in pumped hydro which is one of the only viable grid scale battery sources at the moment. Chemical batteries are only good for smaller towns where pumped hydro is prohibitively expensive and to smooth outputs on wind and solar
gravity batteries are so neat
There are some really neat ones that use cranes to lift heavy blocks, but I don’t know how practical those are because of their complexity. Pumped hydro and using really deep mineshafts with heavy weights are both good gravity battery solutions (with the mine one being much less practical in most places)
I think I saw an engineer once describe the crane-and-blocks one as one of those models that demonstrates the theory really well, but is wildly impractical in most cases
Why don’t you just pump hydro up a mineshaft?
That would work, just need to build or find a reservoir somewhere down there
Chinese economic coercion
give me one fucking example of a single time the Chinese have ‘coerced’ the US economically. what is the aggression the US has to ‘meet’?
That time they made us purchase products from them at a fair price
You can tell the mentality of these people from the fact that they’re talking about sabotaging green energy projects. Fucking death cult
I keep telling people that China can survive without us, but we can’t survive without China. They make the stuff and if things got desperate they could re-configure their economy to make the stuff they need at home. The US doesn’t make the stuff and would be absolutely fucked without trade. It might get really, really messy but at the end of the day they’ve got real manufacturing capacity and we’ve got high finance autocannibalism.
China can keep their “electronic equipment”, their “machinery, including computers”, and their “vehicles”. Let’s see them survive without Marvel Movies and shitcoins!
Mostly correct but I want to point that China does depend on the US for food. I mean I’m sure it’s something the CPC thinks about a lot and I assume they have a plan to reduce dependency but at the moment they import quite a bit of food from the US.
I have heard people assert (on what I think are fairly reasonable grounds) that China is mostly food secure for basic foods and relies on imports for luxury foods (tropical fruit, milk, etc) and soy and corn for use as animal feed.
If this is true, then in a blockade or war situation there would be rationing of meat and luxury foods but basically enough vegetables and grains to avert famine.
On a related note, China apparently has an 18 month stockpile of grain at current consumption, which Eldridge Colby (think tank ghoul) vagueposted about and got dunked on by Chen Weihua.
pick almost any vegetable and china grows near to or more than the next 9 nations combined.
their agricultural system is far more diverse and resilient than the US. they had their own agricultural revolution during the so-called green revolution financed by Western capital, and while it doesn’t grow a mountain of soy/corn like the settler colonial states, it feeds healthy food to a lot of healthy people.
98% of pork in China are foreign breeds. This is a serious issue, since China comprises about half of the world’s pork consumption. If there really is a sanctions on food import for China, there will be a massive plunge in living standards in China and they might actually start a war over it. This is why I don’t think even the US dares to think about sanctioning food.
Also, 18 months is a relatively short time scale for a war between two giant economies. The war in Ukraine has been going on for 18 months now.
98% of pork in China is from foreign breeds of pig raised in China or from meat/adult pigs? If it’s the former then a blockade is not going to suddenly kill all the pigs inside China.
And yes, it would be a massive drop in living standards food wise. However, widespread rationing of meat and fish is in the living memory of a big chunk of the Chinese population and if they didn’t overthrow the government then they’re probably not going to overthrow the government now that America is clearly the villain.
98% of pork in China is from foreign breeds of pig raised in China or from meat/adult pigs? If it’s the former then a blockade is not going to suddenly kill all the pigs inside China.
They won’t die but they have been genetically cross-bred to degrade over 1-2 generations, which means in 4-8 years the pigs will no longer be viable.
Capitalists are not stupid. When you purchase pigs, they don’t sell you their pedigrees, which are kept in highly secured facilities. They sell you the pigs that have been deliberately cross-bred to the point where they can control the rate of its degradation such that it can no longer produce meat at quality and quantity after a while.
The whole point is to force you to keep coming back and buy from them.
I have formal education in domestic animal genetics and broad experience in animal husbandry. that is not a real thing you are talking about. you absolutely need to bring a source to this discussion for that kind of assertion, because what you are talking about is biologically impossible.
breeders close herds all the time and breeds are maintained by breeding organizations. the commercial F1 hybridization lines are controlled, but there is no “self terminate” gene.
To clarify, I should have said the animals are less viable for meat production, not that there is some “self termination” gene.
Chinese breeders have long tried to create local varieties with bloodlines available in-country. Breeding from imported third- or fourth-generation chickens is a bad solution: their genes are less desirable than those of their elite grandparents, making them a poor starting-point for a new variety. In September the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a paper on livestock-rearing that set self-sufficiency in poultry as a goal, calling meat-chicken breeding a priority. Big foreign firms have resisted appeals from officials to send second-generation stock to China. A poultry firm with 10% of the domestic market, Fujian Sunner, says it has bred all-Chinese broilers: their performance is a source of some debate.
They won’t die but they have been genetically cross-bred to degrade over 1-2 generations
god I fucking hate capitalism
If the rest of the world proves too much to be shitass barbarians I fear they may return to their historical isolationism, which may be fine for them, and would be impossible to blame them, but will leave the rest of us a bit fucked
Maybe they will let a few brics countries join them in the civilizationsphere. Not where I’m thinking either of us are though
A lot of people don’t understand that this is the ultimate clash between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.
The US truly and genuinely believe that they can defeat China (industrial capitalism) simply by wielding the power of finance. The depth and liquidity of dollar, the all-pervasive global financial institutions rooted in the dollar regime, are all extremely powerful tools to control the world’s economy. The US doesn’t need to produce anything, it controls how other countries gain access to commodities, goods and services through financial institutions and intellectual property rights, food through the World Bank and credit through the IMF. They’re going to flood the foreign sector with trillions of dollars this fall and there is nothing you can do to stop that deluge of liquid dollar from entering the world’s economy.
On the other hand, China genuinely believes that the sheer power of industrial capital can defeat the hyper-financialized and de-industrialized US empire. After all, people survive on real goods and services, and there is a lot of leverage to be gained simply by being a manufacturing giant. Nevertheless, China remains a net exporter country (using your labor to produce goods and services for others to consume and enjoy) while the US is a net importer country (imagine being able to get free lunches everywhere simply by writing an IOU on a blank piece of paper and everyone would fight and die for the pieces of paper you carry). At the same time, China is still deeply dependent on imported food to feed its 1.4 trillion population. No small task.
The fact is we don’t know who will win out. Some say finance is the ultimate weapon to wield, others say industry is what matters. Only time will tell, provided we haven’t annihilated the world before then.
Food as an industry is going to see rapid transformation in the next decade or so. Emerging meat technologies are progressing incredibly quickly and will reduce inefficiencies in the current food production system.
Hmm, looks like we could lower the standards of living for millions, escalate towards nuclear war, and make it harder to fight climate change. I say we do it.
Man it’s fucked up to weaponize sorghum production, it’s the cheapest super food and it kinda tastes like ass so if they’re eating it it means they need it :/
Remind me again, Mr Worm, how and why did this economic warfare started?
Pure projection by the west that restrictions like this would have a long-term effect on China just because they would over here. China doesn’t operate like us, they aren’t going to shrug their shoulders and wait until the free market sorts itself out.
this would hurt the US at least as much as it would hurt China
determined to continue its streak as the undisputed champion of international and domestic own goals says former Bush White House official.
