Heard yesterday evening from an Asian source that the SS Ronald Reagan is in the South China Sea enroute to the Taiwan area right now. I don't know if that has made the American news sources or not. In any case, a carrier group bobbing around in the water adjacent to Taiwan is not going to be well-received by the Chinese.
...Another round of brinkmanship coming up?
But in any case, most Americans are ignorant of China and how their system works (or doesn't work). My wife, who knows a lot about Asia and China in particular, explained it: China's system, from the top down, is authoritarian. That means if you look good in the government's eyes, you'll be rewarded. If not, well--baaaaad things might happen. So the effect is that the managers at the lowest levels, regardless of the facts, send glowing reports to their higher-ups, who in turn forward those glowing reports (even if they know it's not factual) to THEIR higher ups, and so on up the ladder. The result is what gets disseminated to media is often grossly untrue, but it forms the essence of what the world knows about China, especially if one trusts media to be factual.
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