The CHN/ China thread

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Defence against bigger countries from military to hegemonial threats is always a a problem for smaller countries (therefore NATO and EU), and almost all other countries are smaller than China, or Russia.

Of course, what you mean is they should do their share in a bigger context of a military union alright, but other than Germany Taiwan is alone, so the comparison to Germany is not quite right. They can probably never build arms and maintain a military on a level compared to China, alone.

What if Taiwan had own nuclear weapons? (I guess the last US ones were removed in 1972?)

I of course understand the pressure limited demographic numbers mean for availability of young men to serve in the armed forces (Taiwan's Heinsohn war index 2017 was just 0.88, that of Hong Kong, while we are at it, at 0.56), but what the article refers to and what I wonder about is that the Taiwanese let things slide, end madatory armed service, and let trainign and morale and technological levels detoriate, while they should have an interets in achieving right the opposite. Israel has such problems, too. Look what they make of it. They do exactly the oposite. Mandatory service for men and women, mandatory retraining, keeping training and technology levels as high as they can.

[Skybird]

Does anyone know this novel already, "2034"? I think it sounds like one by Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising maybe, but the readers' reviews at various sites are quite mixed, marking bad literaric style, shallow technological description and poor narrating. Not certain whether its worth my time...!?



https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54211065-2034


https://www.amazon.com/2034-Novel-Ne.../dp/1984881256