Potential Flashpoint for Internatinal Conflict

I wonder what would happen if they deliberately surrendered something like 2 million troops (who knew the game), and then kept another million or two engaged in the conflict,

I guess the west starts learning better ways of keeping millions of soldiers underguard?   I wonder what the ratio of guards to prisoners would be…

US troops sharing MRE’s may be considered an act of biological warfare.

Just imagine what would happen to the chinese soldiers, if they were subjected to translated American reality T.V.

@Gargantua:

US troops sharing MRE’s may be considered an act of biological warfare.

Just imagine what would happen to the chinese soldiers, if they were subjected to translated American reality T.V.

And if we subjected them to eating T.V. Dinners rather tham MREs while they were watching those shows.

There’s a certain amount of truth to that MrMalachiCrunch……, something so crazy it might work.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Feed them what we feed our own kids, in a short period of time they would be too fat to fight!

And in fact this would be somewhat in line with what the Geneva Conventions prescribe, since they require that POWs be given rations which do not fall below the allocation of food given to the troops who are detaining them.  The Americans could even argue to visiting Red Cross inspectors, “Hey, we’re not only respecting the Geneva Conventions, we’re going above and beyond them.  We’re not feeding the POWs the notoriously bad military rations that our own troops always complain about, we’re feeding them the much more tasty and nutrious food we give to our own beloved kids back home!”

@Gargantua:

Well the Geneva convention better not apply if we end up at war with China…

They could just simply “surrender” and we wouldn’t have enough housing to keep them, the ability to feed them, or the ability to guard them.

At all.

And the only hope the western powers would actually have of winning, would involve biological warfare.

I’d rather we lost then it came to that.

I’d rather we lost then it came to that.

I wouldn’t.

Their neighborhood now has more millionares than ours.

https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=CompanyNews&articleid=201206191519STREETCMREALTIME_11586397&IMG=N

Other countries may take China to WTO court over its dominance and manipulation of the rare earth metals market.

https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=CompanyNews&articleid=201206200538RTRSNEWSCOMBINED_BRE85J0DV_1&IMG=Y

Indonesia has tripled the price of coal exported to China, to take advantage of their economic rise.
They may curtail exports more severely and utilize that coal for their own development.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-19/cheap-coal-is-dead-long-live-renewables-part-1-.html

The rising $/KWH electrical rate is slowing down growth in China and India.

Remember how energy resource aquisitions drove a lot of German and Japanese military planners in WWII?

No nation can sustain armed offensives when they lack energy/fuel.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Told by their mouthpiece newspaper but again, no paper in China prints what those in power wish to be printed

Back when the USSR existed, there was a joke about an American tourist in Moscow asking a resident what the difference was between the newspapers Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“Information”).  The resident answered, “It’s very simple.  In Pravda, you will find much information but little truth.  In Izvestia you will find much truth but little information.”

Im just wondering out loud here, but has anyone considered just leaving this alone and letting China and the S.E. nations involved work this out themselves? Dose it really matter if China claims control over a bunch of small atolls and islands in the south China sea? What harm will it really do to the U.S. and how is ticking off what will shortly be the worlds largest economy good for the U.S. in the long term? I know there are some kind of natural resources in the area (oil and natural gas) but so what, wouldn’t the smarter long term plan be to develop more advanced forms of energy use so we no longer needed to worry about or depend on fossil fuels and leave it to the Chinese?

@MrMalachiCrunch:

No, I think the rule of international law should be upheld.

Whose version of “international law” should be upheld then? I mean lets be honest the only reason the US is in involved with this mess is because China is one of the key players, if it wasn’t for that the US and the rest of the western press would have no interest in this. Viet-nam, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries in the area (including Taiwan and Malaysia) all have competing and conflicting claims to these islands, if China wasn’t involved it would just be these small countries squabbling amongst themselves and no one would really care. This has nothing to do with China being a “bully”, but with the US seeing a easy to up our PR in the region and win a few brownie points with the more “bleeding heart” liberal types. Also any chance the US can get to take a “morally superior” stance against China they take because they can’t compete with them economically.