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@romanhelmetguy > “All actual physical territory will be controlled by whoever wins the USA vs China Cold War.” Also, I disagree with this, because Chinese empires aren’t like Western ones. (1) Western empires have a lifecycle of invading everyone, conquering, converting them to their ideology, printing a lot of money and causing a lot of ethnic strife, and then collapsing. That’s Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, Britain, and now America. (2) China is the opposite. They just want others to pay tribute to them, via the tributary system. Otherwise, they don’t want to invade the world, because they would become less Han Chinese in doing so! (3) In a deep sense China is more MAGA than MAGA. They are stay-at-home traditionalists who will let the barbarians abroad do their thing so long as they pay tribute, trade for goods, and not “interfere in China’s internal affairs.” (4) The dual absence of both America and China from much of the map creates opportunities. American empire will withdraw and China, not wanting to repeat the same mistakes, will not deploy Chinese troops abroad in a naive way. Instead it will just trade with local partners in each region. (5) China is like the opposite of the neocons and neolibs, they basically don’t care about what a country does, so long as it doesn’t mess with China. It could be totally corrupt Venezuela or totally meritocratic UAE, Orthodox Christian like Russia or fundamentalist like Iran. China doesn’t care and doesn’t care to invade their land either. Will just trade with them rather than waste trillions on pointless wars.