yunqihao [he/him]

I dont think its crazy that China could beat the US back in a defensive war off their coast given the fact the PLA has the most advanced and largest rocket/missile force on Earth alongside their currently unmatched capacity in drone and ship manufacturing just to start.

China’s military issue is their lack of ability to meaningfully project power which seems is only temporary as the government has nuclear carrier projects and other necessary force projection measures in the works.

You’re right, I dug back into it and the specific “WWII-level destroyer production” line was me mangling a few different sources that were making related but not identical claims.

What is well documented is that China’s shipbuilding capacity and tonnage output absolutely dwarf the United States today. A 2025 CSIS study cited by Navy Times found that a single Chinese shipyard produced more commercial ship tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since World War II, which is where I likely had the WWII comparison stuck in my head. https://www.navytimes.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/03/11/chinas-shipbuilding-dominance-a-national-security-risk-for-us-report/

That same report notes that China now produces over 50% of global shipbuilding tonnage, while the U.S. accounts for roughly 0.1%.

Separately, U.S. Congressional Research Service and Navy assessments estimate that China’s overall shipbuilding capacity measured in gross tonnage is over 200 times larger than that of the United States, largely due to its integrated civilian–military shipyard system. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL33153

In terms of actual naval output, a senior U.S. Indo-Pacific Command admiral has stated that China is currently producing roughly 3–4 times more naval tonnage per year than the United States, even before accounting for its massive commercial shipbuilding sector. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-outpacing-us-shipbuilding-top-indopacom-admiral-says-2025-4

So the WWII comparison was overstated, but the underlying “issue” is arguably more serious for the US. China controls roughly half of global shipbuilding capacity, much of it in dual-use yards that can be partially redirected under wartime mobilization. The United States, by contrast, represents only a fraction of a percent of global shipbuilding and lacks the industrial depth to rapidly replace naval losses in a prolonged conflict. Apologies again I will have to avoid posting so early in the morning without rechecking my sources.

I obviously largely agree with this assessment. It correctly identifies that the expectation of rescue by external powers reflects a lingering ideological inheritance from colonial modernity, rather than a materialist understanding of how emancipation actually occurs. The insistence that sovereignty must be produced internally through class power, state capacity, and concrete struggle is fully consistent with the Marxist Leninist tradition.

Everyone who has properly applied the dialectical materialist method should reach the same position. This is because socialism and Marxism are not belief systems or moral positions but a science. They apply the scientific method of dialectical materialism to the study of history, social development, and class relations. By examining material conditions, contradictions, and historical motion, Marxism allows us to understand how the past shapes the present and how those conditions are likely to shape future developments. As has been emphasized in different formulations by countless marxist scholars, Marxism is a science, and those who apply it correctly to concrete reality will arrive at the same conclusions.

When this method is applied to the contemporary world system, it becomes clear why the question of China or Russia acting as global saviors is wrongly posed. States are not abstract moral agents but historically situated concentrations of class forces operating under specific constraints, including imperial encirclement and the threat of escalation. Genuine internationalism does not mean substituting for another nation’s struggle. It means expanding the material space for oppressed peoples to develop their own productive forces, strengthen their sovereignty, and consolidate their own class power. Anything else risks reproducing dependency under a different flag rather than advancing the real project of anti imperialist emancipation.

That makes sense, except kkkanada and europe are not military peers to the US. Even collectively, they remain heavily dependent on US-controlled systems such as logistics, intelligence, satellites, encrypted communications, and weapons software, which gives Washington enormous leverage over their defense capabilities and limits their ability to operate independently in a high-intensity conflict.

Effort post about the chinese military incoming.

The only true near-peer military competitor the US currently faces is China, and even then only in the context of a US-initiated conflict in East Asia. The PLA is not structured for global expeditionary warfare like the US military, but rather for regional denial, escalation control, and defeating intervention forces before they can establish dominance. That difference in mission profile is crucial for understanding the balance of power.

In terms of current military capabilities, the US still maintains advantages in global power projection, combat experience, nuclear submarine quieting, long-range bomber operations, and alliance integration. The US operates 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers supported by a mature carrier air wing doctrine and worldwide basing network, something China does not yet possess. The US also retains superiority in strategic airlift, overseas logistics, and sustained multi-theater operations.

However, China’s advantages lie elsewhere, and increasingly in areas that matter more in a modern industrial war.

China now possesses the largest navy in the world by ship count, and more importantly, the world’s most powerful naval shipbuilding capacity. Chinese shipyards can produce major surface combatants at a pace the US cannot dream to replicate. Type-055 destroyers (equivalent in displacement to cruisers) are being launched at rates comparable to US WWII production, while the US struggles to replace aging hulls. In a prolonged conflict, this industrial replacement capacity alone dramatically shifts the balance.

This industrial advantage extends across the force. China produces missiles, drones, ships, and aircraft domestically with minimal reliance on foreign suppliers, while the US defense industry has become highly consolidated, slow to scale, and dependent on long supply chains. American production of key systems such as precision munitions, interceptors, and naval platforms cannot currently match the consumption rates projected in a peer war.

China’s missile forces represent perhaps its greatest asymmetric strength. The PLA Rocket Force is the largest in the world, fielding thousands of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles. Systems such as the DF-21D and DF-26 (often described as “carrier killers”) are designed specifically to deny US naval access inside the First and Second Island Chains. China has also deployed the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle, giving it operational hypersonic capability years ahead of the United States. In contrast, the US has yet to field hypersonic weapons at scale.

In the air and maritime domain, China has built one of the densest integrated air defense networks on Earth, combining HQ-9 and HQ-22 systems with early-warning radar, counter-stealth detection research, and layered missile coverage. This significantly constrains US airpower near China’s coastline and forces reliance on long-range standoff weapons.

China’s progress in space, cyber, and electronic warfare is equally central. The PLA treats space as a warfighting domain, not merely a support function. It has demonstrated direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital systems, electronic jamming, and satellite-interference capabilities. The US, which relies far more heavily on satellites for navigation, targeting, and communications, is structurally more vulnerable in this domain.

A major factor often ignored in surface-level comparisons is industrial and economic integration. China’s military-civil fusion system allows civilian industries: shipbuilding, electronics, AI, telecommunications, robotics, and aerospace to be rapidly adapted for military production. Dual-use manufacturing is not an exception but a foundation of PLA modernization. This gives China the ability to surge production during crisis in ways the US system, divided between civilian and defense sectors, struggles to match.

Access to critical minerals and rare earth elements further reinforces this advantage. China dominates global refining and processing of rare earths essential for advanced weapons systems, including: jet engines, radar arrays, guidance systems, precision munitions, drones, and electric motors. Even US weapons production remains partially dependent on Chinese-processed materials, creating strategic vulnerability that cannot be solved quickly.

In emerging systems, China is advancing rapidly. The PLA is heavily investing in autonomous and AI-enabled warfare, emphasizing mass over boutique platforms. Drone swarms, loyal-wingman aircraft, autonomous surface vessels, and underwater drones are being developed to overwhelm defenses through scale. Drones displayed at recent Victory Day parades including stealth UAVs, long-range strike drones, and cooperative swarm platforms indicate a doctrine focused on saturation and system disruption rather than platform-to-platform parity.

Looking forward, several major programs could significantly alter the balance.

China’s navy is expected to transition from conventionally powered carriers to Type-004 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, which would eliminate endurance limitations and allow true blue-water operations. While China currently lacks carrier experience comparable to the US, even one or two nuclear carriers would mark a fundamental shift in operational reach during the 2030s.

In the air domain, China continues expanding its fifth-generation fleet with the J-20 and J-35, while credible evidence points toward the development of a tactical stealth bomber or medium-range stealth strike aircraft, filling the gap between fighters and the H-20 strategic bomber program. Combined with loyal-wingman drones and long-range precision strike, this would significantly increase China’s ability to contest air superiority regionally.

China is also modernizing its nuclear forces, moving from minimum deterrence toward a survivable second-strike posture. New missile silos, road-mobile ICBMs, submarine-launched JL-3 missiles, and early-warning systems indicate a maturing nuclear triad, even if total warhead numbers remain below those of the US and Russia.

Taken together, the competition is no longer simply about who has more advanced individual platforms. It is about industrial depth, sustainment capacity, access to resources, dual-use integration, and the ability to replace losses under wartime conditions.

The US still holds decisive advantages in global reach and experience, but China now holds clear advantages in missile warfare, regional denial, shipbuilding capacity, and industrial mobilization. As China’s carrier force, long-range aviation, autonomous systems, and nuclear infrastructure mature, the gap continues to narrow.

My gut reaction to this nonsense article can be quite succinctly summarized in one quote:

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.

However the marxist in me would die a little if I didn’t explain why i feel this way. This article fundamentally misunderstands China because it approaches global politics from an idealist and Eurocentric framework rather than a materialist one. It treats power as attitude, assertiveness, and spectacle instead of grounding analysis in production, class relations, historical conditions, and the balance of material forces. This is not a minor flaw.

Power does not emerge from bold gestures or rhetorical dominance. It emerges from control over productive forces, industrial capacity, technological development, logistics, energy security, labor organization, and surplus distribution. China’s rise is not a matter of posture but of material transformation. It became the world’s largest industrial producer, built comprehensive infrastructure, lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, and retained state control over finance and strategic sectors. These are the foundations of power. Any analysis that ignores them is not materialist but psychological speculation.

The article also makes a serious theoretical error by equating global leadership with imperial behavior. It assumes that to matter geopolitically China must behave like the United States. Military intervention, regime shaping, and coercive alliances are treated as the natural expression of power. This assumption is the normalization of imperialism itself.

Lenin defined imperialism as monopoly capitalism, finance capital dominance, capital export for profit extraction, and political coercion to enforce those flows. The article never examines capital ownership, surplus extraction, or financial dependency structures. Instead it defines hegemony almost entirely in military terms. By that logic any state that refuses imperialist violence is framed as weak. That is simply imperial ideology stripped of its moral language.

China’s foreign policy cannot be understood without its historical origins. Modern China was born from a century of humiliation marked by colonial occupation, forced trade, famine, invasion, and civil war. The Communist Party emerged from anti imperialist struggle, peasant revolution, and resistance against both Western powers and Japanese fascism. Sovereignty is not an abstract principle in Chinese politics. It is the foundation of survival.

This history directly shaped China’s modern policies such as the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Non interference, respect for sovereignty, and opposition to regime change were not invented as public relations tools. They emerged from lived experience of what imperial intervention actually does to societies. To dismiss these principles as naive is to erase the very conditions that produced them.

The article also ignores the central contradiction of the modern world. The primary global divide is not between competing great powers but between the imperial core and the oppressed nations. China’s foreign policy is not aimed at replacing the United States as global ruler. It is aimed at weakening monopoly control that allows imperialism to function at all.

This is why China focuses on infrastructure, trade diversification, development finance, and industrial cooperation rather than military domination. Projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative are not instruments of territorial control. They are responses to a world in which Western capital refuses long term infrastructure investment unless it produces immediate profit and political submission. Global South states engage China not because China forces them to, but because IMF austerity and Western conditionality devastated their economies.

The article treats the Third World as passive terrain where great powers compete. This is colonial thinking. The Global South is not a chessboard. It consists of nations actively seeking paths out of dependency. China does not create this demand. Imperialism does.

Another major flaw is the complete absence of class analysis. China is discussed as a generic state actor identical in nature to capitalist powers. This erases the distinction between bourgeois states ruled by finance capital and a socialist state managing contradictions within a capitalist world system. China operates with state owned banks, long term planning, capital controls, and political authority over private capital. These are not cosmetic differences. They shape foreign policy, investment logic, and strategic behavior.

The article also misrepresents strategic patience as passivity. Dialectical materialism teaches that quantitative accumulation precedes qualitative transformation. China prioritizes technological independence, domestic market expansion, energy security, food security, and military deterrence because premature confrontation under conditions of encirclement would be idealism, not strength. Avoiding war while consolidating productive forces, it’s not weakness it’s 孙子兵法 level strategy.

Multipolarity is also badly misunderstood. A multipolar world does not require China to dominate others. It requires the breaking of monopoly power. When multiple centers of production, finance, and diplomacy exist, imperial coercion weakens automatically. No single hegemon is required for that process to advance.

At its core, the article seems unable to imagine a world beyond empire. It criticizes the United States yet measures success using imperial standards. What it ultimately desires is not the end of domination but a more competent empire to replace the current one. That is why anti imperial restraint appears as failure and aggression appears as leadership.

From a Chinese, Third World and Marxist Leninist perspective, the goal is not a new hegemon. The goal is the erosion of the imperial system itself. China’s approach is contradictory and imperfect, but it has materially expanded the space for national development, weakened Western financial monopoly, and reduced the ability of imperial powers to dictate global outcomes.

The tragedy of the article is not simply that it is wrong about China. It is that it mistakes imperial behavior for historical necessity and cannot conceive of power existing outside domination.

If you are serious about understanding the current world order, you must analyze material conditions, historical struggle, class relations, and the lived experience of the oppressed nations. Without that, analysis becomes commentary. And commentary, no matter how confident, is not theory.

I’m sure you mean well but unfortunately a boycott is not going to stop imperialism and its certainly not how Cuba has survived until now. History is clear that passive acts do not change systems only through organized militant resistance can real change be affected, and a boycott is the most passive form of resistance.

A suite of dongfeng missiles next hopefully to secure Cuba’s sovereignty absolutely.

Most of the ruling class in Europe is so embedded in the US order that any change that occurs will never be of their accord or led by them.

It would be so incredible if the EU and US tore each other down through their interimperialist dick measuring. Unfortunately I just dont think Europe has the balls to fight back or stand up for itslef in any meaningful way before rolling over to tongue polish US boots again.