http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13693495

- I know I have sino-phobia, but this feels somewhat historic, in a chilling way!

/shrug. So they have a second hand remanufactured Russian carrier. Its still a Chinese product which is to say a cheap knock off. Plus they need to actually be able to conduct ops. China tends to learn fast, thanks to all their corporate and military espionage, but it will take a bit more for them to be an effective carrier navy. They can go harass their African satellite states all they want but that is about it.

End the restriction on the JDF and allow them to form a real military. then form a SE Asian mutual defense treaty that includes S. Korea, Japan, phillipines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and any other interested partners and haters on China in the region.
Be sure to include India in this as it would lend tremendous weight to any treaty and also serve to curb the ambitions of Pakistan. problem solved.

Except that 50 years down the line when China's economy is twice the size of the US, they have 20 super carriers, US budget deficits and debt have forced a halving of your own carrier fleet, then it'll be like a coalition of Latin states combining against the economic and military might of the US today.

OK, maybe I'm a doomsayer, perhaps I'm bordering on racism - but I just don't trust the Chinese!

China is not going to sustain the current pace of growth, Halo. Most do seem to assume that nothing will slow China down and that nothing will go wrong but that is far from the truth. The Chinese government has an even greater disconnect with its people than the US government at the very hypothetical worst case. The Chinese communist party's greatest concern really has to be the enemy being within their own borders. No fleet of 20 carriers is going to help them with that, unless they intend to fly the planes off those carrier decks in order to kill their own people during an uprising.

Energy is another mitigating factor. China as an export economy relies on the rest of the world being able to purchase what they produce. China might very well kill that golden egg laying goose thanks to their own success and huge demand for petroleum as well as other energy and raw material products driving the global markets up past what the planet as a whole can produce in order to keep markets stable. Suddenly the average consumer can no longer afford to buy food, let alone widgets made overseas. Bulk shippers could also see their energy costs soar as well and have to pass the costs along to wholesalers which of course drives the cost of everything way up. The end result is many things outsourced to China and other countries suddenly make more sense to be produced on our own shores again. The CONEX box (containerized shipping) and cheap energy made China what it is due mostly in part to allowing bulk access to cheap labor.

All that could be China's undoing due to the inability of China to even come close to sustaining its population based on domestic production and only marginally meets basic needs like providing the basics such as clean water and air. Thus they are very vulnerable to fluctuations in the energy and commodities markets since so much of that has to be imported into China from elsewhere. China has the world's busiest seaports due to the fact that so much has to come in addition to all that merchandize heading out to Walmarts and Home Depots. Counties such as the US, which could be self sufficient if they so choose thanks to the ability to grow all that food we all love so much, our abundance of fresh water and natural mineral resources still leaves things in a pretty good balance that really doesn't favor China. Fresh water and clean air alone is priceless.

So again, at the very most the Chinese carrier navy would probably be not much more than what the US carrier navy is: a bargaining chip. A means to strong arm weak nations that have decided to stubbornly refused to give a preferential rate on something the carrier fleet nation wants. My guess is that Africa will see the most visits from a Chinese carrier navy, as the rest of Asia really has little to offer in terms of easy ( with "easy" being the keyword) Chinese conquest. The world would push back hard against China of they invaded Korea or Japan or even Taiwan or Vietnam but no one would give much past lip service if China invaded Sudan or Mozambique. Then China can welcome itself to the elite club of having to fight an insurgency and waging a war thousands of miles from their own major supply lines.

Please throw in a few Environment.Newline's... please...

Yah I get it. You could have just said "paragraphs" like a normal person and spared the IT jargon. Look, I hit enter a bunch of F'ing times and that usually results in a new paragraph, but in this case it didn't. Might try to edit it on this computer that doesn't have scripting disabled as opposed to the one the post originally got made with that runs NoScript......

Look at that. All fixed.

Yah I get it. You could have just said "paragraphs" like a normal person and spared the IT jargon. Look, I hit enter a bunch of F'ing times and that usually results in a new paragraph, but in this case it didn't. Might try to edit it on this computer that doesn't have scripting disabled as opposed to the one the post originally got made with that runs NoScript......

Look at that. All fixed.You have a great deal of pent up aggression that you let out on this message board. You are very quick to take offense to minor things, including a request for paragraphs to make it easier for us to consume your ideas, interjected with a bit of "IT jargon" that I used intending to get (at most) a smirk out of a couple of the programmers that frequent this forum. It wasn't intended to be offensive, derogatory, or insulting.

You really should relax a bit, maybe take a vacation if possible.

1) Yes, I could use a vacation but it won't happen for quite a while.

2) You posted your remark in order to make a non-programmer correct an issue with a post. I had to Goggle what that meant honestly. Than I got annoyed, because it should not take looking up something just to understand what is otherwise a simple and reasonable request. Use plain English, not jargon just to get a rise out of your programmer friends while leaving others to scratch their heads. That kinda stuff is one of my pet peeves about this board. I don't have much in the way of pent up aggression but this board is not just for the brilliant brainiac people in the IT field. Try to go easy on us dumbasses or you might get a less than cheerful response at times.

Lumm is correct in that China face many potential pitfalls that could de-rail their golden age.
Did we not just learn the lesson that big rapidly expanding bubbles of growth face equally large crashes?
Funny how China has built their industrial hegemony on ignoring pollutants and environmental standards but are now fully realizing the mess they have made. most likely we see them having to create some sort of PREPA that makes our EPA look like minnow to their whale. how will that affect the cheap labor factor?

China also tends to like to buddy up with Third World governments that are either dictatorial or damn near close that tend to not mind their country's wealth getting loaded aboard a tanker or freighter bound for Chinese shores. The top guy, such as Hugo Chavez, tends to get a fat cut while the average citizen of that country doesn't see Jack Shit as far as benefits from the arrangement in terms of jobs or long term improvement to quality of life. Granted, there might be loans or direct upgrades to infrastructure for the country being exploited to sweeten the deal as a political PR boon for the local despot, at the end of the day it is still exploitation heavily favoring China.

The new infrastructure, municipal buildings etc tend to be shoddy and last long enough just for China to secure what they want and establish logistics to get it to the Mainland. Such one sided deals tend to breed quite a bit of spite, since we are basically talking colonialism here, which did not work out so well back in the day for European powers. Still, China has been the dominant culture for most of the past 4000 years and probably feel they are just picking up where they left off during the intermission where the West had dominance and don't have to learn anything new. They will build these carriers to assure they get their one sided deals by putting the screws on any Third World governments who suddenly have a fit of compassion for their people and want more favorable terms. That or to prop up their puppet ruler in the event of a public uprising. The US and Europe won't do shit about it either. Every knows this fleet is not the start of some new Cold War that nobody wants because the global economy is just too interwoven. Too many people would stand to lose too much. Beijing basically sets global labor costs, holds everyone's debt and it is to everyone's short term benefit to allow China to continue to have ready access to vital raw materials and energy resources in order to keep the global markets stable. The West allows it all to happen by driving the demand for cheap goods and outsourcing of services.

The catch is that China is not building a society based on anything new. They want consumerism and conspicuous consumption based on the use of fossil fuels since that formula equals growth and legitimacy for the authoritarian Communist Party. A party whose few principle members as well as a very small minority of the business class see most of the benefits from China's new golden age and define the fate of the billions of the rest of us. The average Chinese see enough crumbs flow their way as well as upgraded municipal infrastructure to stay happy or at least appeased. Granted they aren't starving anymore, but when China becomes the top economy of the world with all the trappings of global hegemony that comes with it, the average per capita earnings still rank China as a "poor" nation. If they were actively pursuing a society of conservation and self reliance where their new wealth translated into the average Chinese having a bit more of a say in the management of their day to day lives than maybe people could be less concerned. Not so, unfortunately. A select few individuals are going to rape the planet dry. As it stands now, between the power elite of the US, Europe and the ballooning economies of China, India and Brazil, the world is going to quickly run out of cheap fuel and resources. Whoever locks down the most exclusive access to these materials will still hold out for a while even if the global economy tanks and the markets soar to the point where most everything is out of reach and desperation sets in. So China builds a blue water navy to lock down this loot. It doesn't even have to be a good fleet. Heck it is even better for China to build an inferior one that is no match for the US since we won't get our panties in a wad about it and go on a huge weapons spree no one can afford. I just has to be a bully tool. The rest is academic.

I agree with Lum. China needs the American popluace to purchase its fancy trinkets and import exclusive raw materials only manufactured in china, (I am involved in purchasing roughly 200 million dollars worth of pigments from China each year).

China building its empire (military) smells like Russia and the US. Let them spends billions and billions of dollars (hopefully some is spent back in the US on equipment)...only to float around in a large ocean with nothing much to do but prepair for martians to invade.