How effective would an American blockade of China be? I always see it described as an ace up the sleeve for the US in a potential war but I find it hard to believe that a country as large as China couldn't find substitutes elsewhere.
How effective would an American blockade of China be...
Eli Russell
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Luke Taylor
realistically these are the primary areas that china would need to control if there was a threat of a naval blockade from anyone
Adrian Clark
>China couldn't find substitutes elsewhere.
A blockade would mostly affect their exports, which would crash their economy, and food imports. They’d become self sufficient in food once 50 million or so Chinese die off.
Leo Diaz
Most of their imports and exports are thru shipping over water. Shipping via bulk container ship is cheap cheap compared with land transportation. China would have a pretty massive negative effect from a successful ocean blockade. First off they are almost in a food crisis right now. Reduced trade means no products out and no food in. Their international land routes are terrible, their rail systems are borderline with some critical route limiters. In a war they have very little strategic force projection. A few simple cruise missile attacks could really mangle land routes. So they would have suck it up with asymmetric responses. Even low intensity attacks on land routes and a blockade would seriously suck for China. India, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar would probably take that opportunity to resolve some issues they have with China. Chinese-sponsored debt-traps have really pissed off folks there and India has territory issues. Expect China to go to guns the moment a real blockade started. But the US does not have to win, it merely has to play to make China starve.
Henry Collins
Jack Wilson
Absurdly effective. They are not fuel, food, raw materials, and especially not ore self sufficient. (best of luck producing so much steel and aluminum without ore). Their real economy (ignoring paper numbers such as property values, which are stupidly inflated) is heavily reliant on imports and exports. In order to secure their economic life lines they would first have to control: which is pretty much impossible as they are all next to land of countries that the USN has bases in and protection agreements with. Then protect their ships to and from destination (africa their major source of ore, would require the PLAN to kick the USN out of the Indian ocean, and the entirety of the middle east.) Which is even more impossible as now they have a supply line that's just as longs at the USNs.
Substitutes are not magic. Without stupidly large deposits of bauxite you're not producing aluminum, period. Without oil, their production of plastics and fuels will be extremely limited, wiping out ~70% of their current consumption drastically reducing transportation within China crushing their domestic economy. And the list goes on and on. Mostly, the substitutes are to go without as which effectively means they have to accept being a rank 50 economy, or not provoke the USN to blockade them.
Oh yeah, last tidbit, only 3% of there economy is moved via land. Sea is so much cheaper as has said.
Benjamin Bennett
>Oh yeah, last tidbit, only 3% of there economy is moved via land.
That's in a peacetime, profit-incentive based economy. Is it impossible for them to switch to land-based transportation in wartime where cost effectiveness is not as much of an issue?
Colton Lewis
Nope. They don't have the rail lines necessary to increase traffic by any large amount (it will be rail, NOT road shipping, because Rail is much cheaper then road, doesn't mattter anyways as the roads dont exist either.) To give some perspective a standard container ship holds some 9612 shipping containers. That is why it is so much cheaper to ship via sea then by land.
In terms of exports, cost will make exactly no one buy from them. Why pay 20x the price for the same item? In terms of imports, suddenly they have to pay 20x, which reduces the amount they can purchase to 5% of what they'd originally buy. Foreign exchange is a bitch for this example, unless they find a lot of countries will to trade entirely in the Yuan. That wont happen if China cannot even secure its own trade lines, because they'll appear very very weak, and no one except maybe Iran and north korea would take that bet.
Profit driven economies are extremely efficient, and any switch away from them has uniformly resulted in significantly worse outcomes, increased waste, decreased benefit, etc. Forcing such a change upon 97% of a countries trade will effectively kill that countries trade. Can China survive that, sure, they'll just be a bigger version of North Korea, and not the world wide hegemon they so dearly want to be.
Adrian Cox
There just isn't the capacity on existing road and rail. Then, what little they do export by land is mostly things that are produced in what little industry they have in central/western China. The vast majority of Chinese people live near the coast in the East (pic). On top of all that China is a major oil importer, a big part of the reason that moving goods by land is more expensive than sea is it uses more fuel, something they are going to be desperately short of.
Julian Perez
How likely is it that the two even go to war? China is much too reliant on foreign trade these days and still has to sort out major domestic issues like rural poverty and population difficulty in the major cities, and America isn't likely to want to fight ever since the CIA figured out that it's more profitable to be funding a dozen minor proxy wars than directly fighting in one major one
Dominic Cox
As soon as China thinks that a war is a great distraction from internal issues and thinks that the USA isn't willing to fight, and America realizes that you can't really have a proxy war if most of the world, and your own citizens, turn a blind eye to China's domestic policy. However, you're still far more likely to see American and Chinese "advisers" duking it out in skirmishes and small-scale battles in Africa than open warfare on a large scale.
Elijah Ortiz
Not effective because of one thing:
Russia.
Russia provides oil, gas, ores and China even has major farms in Russia.
Also, Chinese economy nowadays is only 20% reliant on exports and 40% based on consumption and services. During a war, these numbers are unimportant anyway, since there is a war-mobilization going on anyway, with all the factories in the pearl river delta conscripted to make missile parts to bombard American warships and bases.
Cooper Cruz
Belt/Road is to reduce the effectiveness of blockade, especially for their oil/trade dependence.
Suppose America blockades the South China Sea and suppose China does nothing about South China Sea. If they have their Belt/Road activated, then they can still trade with the Russians/Middle East/Central Asian/Europe directly. Direct rail road/high speed train network that dwarves the rest of the world's capacity multiple times over/oil pipe lines/etc.
Military option would be quite a shit show due to how many missiles China have and their counter measures to destroy/jam American satellites and their own redundant networks that don't depend on satellites
Caleb Hall
Great, now where’s all the pipelines, rails, and roads Russia needs to pick up the rest of the worlds slack?
Noah Jones
>How effective would an American blockade of China be?
Nearly crippling, a few minefields would force almost all of their trade to travel over longer overland routes that would both mean both a serious reduction in the overall volume of material and reliance on vulnerable infrastructure.
Jayden Jackson
Yes the good old belt and road propaganda. Lots of wishful thinking and posturing, not much real results. Even if it is a vast rail network, there is nothing high speed about it and its capacity is peanuts compared to container ships.
Charles Sanchez
Maybe so, but a trillion dollar investment has to be doing something. No one gives away $1 trillion for free.
Charles Barnes
It also means that the shit ton of trucks and locomotives being transferred for trade purposes aren't supporting the military.
Alexander Sullivan
You’re a fucking retard.
Easton Davis
It gives them a good alternative to sea trade, but roads and railways are even more vulnerable than ports. If things escalate to a naval blockade of China (i.e. due to an attempted invasion of Taiwan or whatever), hitting major bridges and tunnels with cruise missiles would be unlikely to be an escalation above what's already happening.
Caleb Barnes
lol, oh yeah Siberia is known as the bread basket of the world! Heck the infrastructure to transfer all of that doesn't even exist currently, but hey, that's not going to dissuade you, because in your mind once at war, Russia will throw all of its resources into supports the Chinese and build this infrastructure in days! Instead of you know, selling the Chinese out for removal of sanction and recognition of crimea...
>Chinese economy nowadays is only 20% reliant on exports and 40% based on consumption and services
lol, these are BS numbers. Please cite your source, so that we can laugh when you post a Chinese propaganda piece. Probably even one which claims that despite imports falling y/y, exports falling y/y, manufacturing contracting, internal shipping volumes dropping massively, the yuan devaluing, somehow the economy still expanded in dollar terms by 6% or more!
>major domestic issues like rural poverty and population difficulty in the major cities
This plus economic pain caused by the trade war and their already slowing economy are exactly the reasons they would go to war with their neighbors, and most likely the US. ( they really do believe they can win a short sharp war with the US, and they also believe that the US would never escalate if it gets attacked by surprise and takes some loses. No, the US would never launch a multidecade world wide war of destruction if that happened...) I'd place the likelihood at around 50% if the trade war escalates further, but around 20% if the trade war is resolved after the next election.
Problem is a war in Africa doesn't help them play up the nationalism card while Taiwan continues to exist. People would ask why are you leaving Taiwan alone, and that must be because you're weak. Therefore if China goes to war it will either be in the SCS with Vietnam and/or the Philippines, or it will be in Taiwan. Unfortunately, both options probably lead to USN involvement and
Jonathan Collins
lol hot opinion there bro
Matthew Morgan
Source on export figures:
data.worldbank.org
Compare that with Germany, which has 47%
data.worldbank.org
China is world export champion (Germany the 2nd place) while not being so reliant on it as you want it.
As for China's falling economy, why is their consumer numbers still so good?
Also, Russia is larger than just Siberia. Chinese investments stretch across all of Russia and there is literally no reason for Russia to betray China by not selling them resources, since that's their only business anyway.
And no, Russia knows that without China, their flanks are open and NATO will never give them Crimea anyway because of the butthurt Poles, Balts and other cuck races.
Camden Ramirez
How are they going to get there with, again, the sea blockade and the non-existent or easily stuck rail and road lines?
Luis Baker
Just read the article. Jesus. They turned every available calorie into hate.
Tyler Anderson
Easily struck rail lines to the neighboring country, Russia? Who is a nuclear power as well? Way to make them betray China when you are bombing their territory.
Sorry, but no blockade would work against China. Especially none that has a layout like this:
Literally all your blockading fleet is just asking to get sunk by volleys of hypersonics.
Christian Sanchez
Submarines are pretty invulnerable to hypersonic missiles
Lucas Williams
>Literally all your blockading fleet is just asking to get sunk by volleys of hypersonics.
Hypersonics don’t work so well against mines, bro. Or are you going to target each $5K mine with a $10M hypersonic wunderwaffe? Good luck with that.
Jason Morales
build 1 of these every 2 months at ONE shipyard. Buy the time your Congress finishes debating they'll probably have around 20 of those. Without surface support, submarines = reefs. As to why there would be no surface support, see their new hypersonic toys.
Michael Howard
>Literally all your blockading fleet is just asking to get sunk by volleys of hypersonics.
Australian SSK's could lay minefields, its something that could be accomplished using fairly minor assets.
>Easily struck rail lines to the neighboring country, Russia?
Unless they take cargo off the trains and literally carry them into China, you just hit the lines on the Chinese side of the border.
Charles Reyes
Why do you think china has put several billion dollars into a bunch of railroads crisscrossing Eurasia
Cooper Clark
No shit Russia is larger than Siberia; however, the only ground route between Russia and China is in eastern Siberia. And there exists but a single tans siberia railroad. In order to move the quantity of materiel you suggest, there would need to be dozens of rail linkages and hundreds of trans siberian lines. Because Siberia is a desolate wasteland, and all the oil, the food, and ore are coming from the Western populated region of Russia.
>And no, Russia knows that without China, their flanks are open and NATO will never give them Crimea anyway because of the butthurt Poles, Balts and other cuck races.
HAHAHAHAHA, chink delusions. Russia knows that China is a bigger threat than NATO, and given the opportunity for good relations with NATO they would happily sell out the Chinese. Further, NATO doesn't really give two shits about Crimea outside of sanctions. This makes the sanctions a perfect bargaining chip for future Russian actions. Its a win-win for NATO and Russia, but a major loss for China.
>why is their consumer numbers still so good?
Because they are false. It is literally mathematically impossible for their consumption to go up in dollar value when import, exports, production, manufacturing, transportation numbers, and the value of the Yuan all fall.
Further according to your source, the value of their services has gone up without ANY negative fluctuation, even during 08 when they lost a massive amount of value in dollar terms, somehow they continued up exactly at the same rate as before lol. Their real estate and construction markets (which are entire paper value and have exactly zero relation to real life) account for 34% of GDP now.
Idiot, they'd be struck in China not Russia. The Russian portion of the line would be sabotaged not tomahawked.
Daniel Anderson
lol, do you even know what and LHD is?
That number will need to be in the tens of trillions in order to achieve anything on the scale necessary to make a difference in OPs scenario.
Brody Nelson
I think China’s only play in this case is full scale nuclear retaliation. Sure it means complete suicide of their country, but what else are they gonna do?
James Anderson
>Because they are false. It is literally mathematically impossible for their consumption to go up in dollar value when import, exports, production, manufacturing, transportation numbers, and the value of the Yuan all fall.
>literally mathematically impossible
you keep using those words I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
Christian Bennett
Russia isn't going to be able to move enough material to even begin to cover for the loss of virtually all overseas shipping, I'd suggest you actually look at Russia's far Eastern infrastructure.
Jack Martin
>see their new hypersonic toys.
You’re apparently retarded, so I’ll repeat myself. Hypersonics don’t do jack shit against mines.
Justin Ortiz
Do you what an LHD does?
HInt #1. It carries lots of helicopters.
Josiah Long
>HInt #1. It carries lots of helicopters.
And jet fighters.
Juan Cruz
even easier.
>What is a mine sweeper?
Jace Sanchez
Things that can be attacked
Noah Campbell
Is English your first language?
(not the guy you're responding to)
Caleb Morgan
Little comfort to the merchant marine
James Taylor
and that magically invalidates naval mines and submarines?
Thomas Garcia
>build 1 of these every 2 months at ONE shipyard
Better get another shipyard started on them. Two months per hull means they’ve got the survivability of a mayfly in a blast furnace. You’ll need lots of output to replace the ones that sink every time the sea state goes above 4.
Austin Anderson
No?
Austin Lewis
How many does the PLAN have right now? Harpoons are cheap.
Owen Jackson
>you keep using those words I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
Actually you fail to understand any of them. The official Chinese government approved numbers are mathematically impossible. They literally cannot be true. To base any understanding of their economy off those number is lunacy and not even the Chinese government does that! scmp.com
scmp.com
Gavin Hernandez
Damn it, forgot my pic.
English must not be your first language if you cannot understand those simple words.
Andrew Rivera
All those fucking mountains in Tibet and they have no natural resources inside them? I would think bauxite and iron ore is the one thing they're not in short supply of.
Brody Gomez
without surface support? Yea, submarines are invalidated.
>mines
>let's put mines on international shipping lanes
>nothing could go wrong diplomatically
why don't you just sink every ship that heads for China at their home ports?
Oliver Perez
didn't you know that those figures the CCP report had already taken those into account?
They literally take off 30% of all growth figures reported by local governments to compose the national numbers. If anything they may have understated the numbers.
>hurr durr if man came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around? Check mate atheists!
Charles Scott
>without surface support?
Take a look the map of the shipping choke points, subs can be supported at all those points.
>why don't you just sink every ship that heads for China at their home ports?
In any serious conflict this would happen, they'd set areas where any shipping is fair game.
Dylan Foster
You’re a retard
So are you
Mason Rodriguez
no u
Jose Watson
How hard would it be for them to expand railway networks and increase trade with Russia for natural resources?
Adam King
Go take a look at the infrastructure that connects the western and eastern portions of Russia. Replacing oversea shipping using that is impossible.
Jayden Richardson
You sure about that? China is notorious for creating massive projects with no demand or use for them. The Chinese built an entire city which is like 95% unoccupied. They tear down and rebuild bridges exactly the same way, because it lets them fudge the numbers and pretend the jobs they created are actually contributing to growing the economy, rather than being a complete waste of resources.
Alexander Cooper
China has large reserves of iron ore but the cost of extraction is high and it's nowhere near enough to meet the enormous demand of China's steelmaking industry, so they've become by far the largest importer of iron in the world, representing 90% of global iron consumption and deriving a similar amount from foreign sources.
Cooper Sullivan
the miracles of socialism with chinese characteristics
Jayden Hernandez
>China is notorious for creating massive projects with no demand or use for them. The Chinese built an entire city which is like 95% unoccupied.
sensationalism.
>They tear down and rebuild bridges exactly the same way, because it lets them fudge the numbers and pretend the jobs they created are actually contributing to growing the economy, rather than being a complete waste of resources.
Now you're just being retarded.
Kevin Sanchez
Blockading the entire Chinese coastline would be possible for the US Navy, but it would tie up a shitload of assets and I don't think we'd do a very good job at maintaining it once civilian vessels start trying to run it/ram our ships. Officers would probably all be too pussyfooted to actually order their ships to open fire on civilian vessels when the time came.
Anthony Morgan
Effectively none. The Himalayas are mostly composed of igneous rocks: granite, diorite, gabbro, tonalite, monazite and pegmatite, with a reasonable percentage of sedimentary rocks primarily dolomite, shale and limestone. Exactly none of these are good ore sources, so yeah the Himalayas are pretty much worthless.
Lincoln Clark
Map?
Andrew Peterson
Thank you geology user.
Jayden Miller
>without surface support? Yea, submarines are invalidated.
lol, what? Man take you WWII thinking elsewhere, surface fleets are just targets for the real killers in the ocean.
>hurr durr if man came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around? Check mate atheists!
Not him, but wtf are you talking about? Do you seriously think that makes a lick of sense, or are you not completely retarded?
Daniel Lopez
Sparse
James Foster
>They literally take off 30% of all growth figures reported by local governments to compose the national numbers. If anything they may have understated the numbers.
Behold, the glory of the CCP. Where the number mean nothing and the lives don't matter.
Justin Allen
But aren't aluminum and iron the 3rd and 4th most common elements, is it that far fetched that if you dug a mile into the Himalayas you'd be guaranteed to hit a vein of something? Or is prospecting for resources mostly limited to above ground observation?
Owen Phillips
Were there no railroads linking Kazakhstan and Mongolia into the Soviet Union?
Christian Lee
Yes, but those were smaller rail lines. The trans-Siberian line is the largest across that area.
Benjamin Ortiz
you're a retard too.
Do some actual reading, including SOE PMI vs private sector PMI, retard.
Nolan Taylor
William Ramirez
Eh soldiers and people are alot crueler than you realize
Henry Gray
You don't have to fire on every merchant ship in sight. Just declare a blockade zone, and insurance rates for ships entering that area will become so high that no one will bother anymore.
Austin Cooper
Good luck trying to neutralise Indonesia. The MOST DANGEROUS NAVAL POWER in S. E. Asia.
Andrew Richardson
What's the difference between a small and large line? I imagine if you have two railroad tracks you can keep traffic constantly going two ways.
Jayden Butler
>China has hypersonics!
You can't use hypersonics against submarines and mines
If China's only strategy is "shoot at surface ships", it's already over. The war was won by the US before China even got involved. Sorry.
Henry Phillips
>China will become stronger
>China will drive the world into the ground
>When the first robots are able to replace people they'll be mass produced there and shipped to America for pocket change
>The world will go to shit before your eyes
Who's ready for /slums/?
Xavier Martinez
>muh PMI
>MUH NUMBERS
>CHINA STRONK
Connor Peterson
>Chinese merchant navy
>Caring about insurance rates when their bottom line is at stake
Charles Bailey
you're too stupid to even broach this topic.
just stfu and gtfo, moron.
Easton Young
Mason Howard
Nobody will have qualms with sinking Chinese flagged vessels
Easton Rodriguez
> is it that far fetched that if you dug a mile into the Himalayas you'd be guaranteed to hit a vein of something?
It is very far fetched. Earth's crust is not homogeneous, which means different places will have drastically different compositions. Further, in most places you'll find the less dense rocks and ores on top of the more dense rocks and ores. If there was Bauxite, it would be above the granite layer due to Bauxite's significantly lower density, but since we have yet to find a bauxite layer on any himilayan peak and have exposed granite layers we can safely say that there is no bauxite is any appreciable quantity (you may find a few kgs here and there but that is meaningless from a mining perspective) Also remember that the Himalayas were formed by the collision of two plates pushing their normally near mantle rock upwards, which will cause the peaks toe be composed far more of high density materials such as granite.
Christian Nelson
Joshua Collins
Stay seething chang. I'm sure one day you'll get a pittance of a reward
Anthony Murphy
Russian oil and gas exports and dependent on US technology.
Joseph Butler
I'm sorry you're too stupid to realize your stupidity.
Have fun being dumb and poor.
Dominic Brown
Just destroy all chinese fishing vessels. Bam. China starves in weeks.
Anthony Johnson
I didn't know the Chinese were pure pescatarians.
(yes, I'm calling you retarded)
Christopher Rodriguez
I don't know who you are, but you're really making me appreciate geology.
Ryan Wood
>What is the silk road
Justin Martin
we must dissent
Luis Brooks
A static target
Aaron Peterson
China could survive a blockade, it would cost them millions of lives, but that's china, a cricket farts and a million die.
The real question is whether china could survive a blockade and open war with America, keep in mind that china will be bottled up in the South "China" Sea and rationing everything, while America will be free to trade and manufacture at will.
Compare the size of the US Navy before pearl harbour to the US Navy 6 months after pearl harbour, then remember that Japan had a much better strategic position then, than china has today.
William Sullivan
It's not even if China could survive a blockade, it's if the current Chinese government could survive the accompanying quality of life loss and massive infrastructure and population distribution changes needed. That's not even getting to the fact that China would also be going into every trade negotiation from an exceptionally weak position.
Leo Walker
Good point, im not sure exactly how much the Chinese will take before they overthrow the CCP though, HK is anglo'd so they have more experience of freedom than the mainlanders.
I feel like china would declare war on the US, Viets, Japs or Flips first, in order to hold it all together
Cooper Wood
It's not even overthrowing the CCP, it's if the administrations and current cliques in charge could retain power. The additional question is if the transfer of power would be painless; if the people under him started grumbling, would Winnie the Pooh go full crackdown, would he try to internal politics himself to remain in charge, or would a dozen guys walk into his office and tell him he can either quietly retire or be taken out back?
Asher Moore
Didn't consider that, I don't know much about China's internal politics, to be honest