Second Short Quiz – “The Avoidable War” Intro – Chapter 9

[johnkarls]

.

It is respectfully suggested that you make a list of your own questions that are provoked by “The Avoidable War” – since all of us are unique and your questions are worth discussing also!!!


1. Why does Kevin Rudd refer on p. 5 to “…..shared American and Chinese concerns for…..the impacts of climate change.”???

2. Is Rudd ignorant of the facts that China is by far the world’s largest carbon-gas producer??? And that The Paris Climate Accord of 2016 – JUST LIKE ITS PREDECESSOR, THE KYOTO PROTOCOL OF 1997 – EXEMPTED CHINA FROM “LIFTING A FINGER” UNTIL THE FAR-DISTANT FUTURE, IF EVER??? Is this echoed on pp.14-15 as the third of three goals of a “framework” for Chinese-American relations??? And re-echoed in Chapter 7 as the fourth of ten “concentric circles” of mutual interest???

3. On p. 11, Rudd refers to “the party’s controversial 2018 decision to remove the two-term limit for five-year presidential terms that was written into the 1982 Chinese State Constitution” without explaining that Chinese Presidential terms had long since been for 10 years and that Xi Jinping would achieve re-election to a SECOND 10-YEAR TERM at the 20th Party Congress in 2022???

4. Is an interesting tidbit (pp. 12-13) that Xi Jinping (born 6/14/1953 and, therefore, now 71 years old) has only one child, a daughter, whom he sent in 2010 to Harvard under a pseudonym for her undergraduate degree in psychology??? And that despite his daughter’s fluency in English, Xi neither speaks nor reads English???

5. Does Rudd display his ignorance of history by referring on p. 16 to “the near-death experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis”???

6. Does Rudd continually refer to his personal friend, Graham Allison whom we have many times encountered as the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Founding Dean and Douglas Dillon Professor of Government – especially when our focus book was on his “Nuclear Terrorism” about how to deal with Osama bin Laden’s fatwā commanding his followers to nuke 10 million Americans???

7. And does Rudd cite (p. 18) Graham Allison about how the famous “Thucydides Trap” that holds the relationship between an established power and a rising power (such as ancient Sparta and Athens) leads “inevitably” to war – is wrong because “inevitable” is only “probable” based on his analysis of 16 instances of this occurring during the last 500 years and a quarter of them (presumably 4) did NOT??? BTW, would 1 of the 4 presumably be Pax Americana taking over from Pax Britannica???

8. Moreover, is the “Thucydides Trap” obsolete in the nuclear age when the theory of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (with its apt acronym – “MAD”) posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender???

9. Was a previously-unknown (to Yours Truly) historical tidbit (p. 24) that the Chinese Government during World War I “dispatched hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers to the western front to dig trenches, build field hospitals, deliver ammunition, and work in French factories” and “[T]housands of them lost their lives”???

10. Rudd claims (p, 31) that upon Chairman Mao’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950, he called the Chinese troops “volunteers” so that the fledgling PRC would “not have to officially declare war on the U.S.” – but doesn’t this display an appalling ignorance that the LAST HISTORICAL INSTANCE of the quaint international practice of “declaring war” occurred at the beginning of World War II, a decade earlier???

11. In this regard, isn’t it true that the U.S. Congress’ sole Constitutional power to “declare war” has NOT been exercised vis-à-vis any of the many wars in which the U.S. has engaged since declaring war on Japan following Pearl Harbor (NB: Hitler obliged FDR by immediately declaring war on the U.S. in a stupid display of support for his ally, Imperial Japan)???

12. Even though Rudd does reference (pp. 30-31) Sen. Joe McCarthy’s famous Senate hearings during the 1950’s on the question of “Who Lost China?” which became a famous witch hunt with, e.g., many Hollywood careers ruined, why does Rudd fail to mention the 4 televised U.S. Presidential debates in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy??? After all, weren’t these debates the first-ever televised Presidential debates, after which there were none until 1976 when they became de rigueur??? BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, DID THE THIRD OF THOSE 4 DEBATES FOCUS, IN THE WAKE OF McCARTHYISM, ON THE QUESTION OF WHETHER MILITARY FORCE SHOULD BE USED TO PREVENT CHINA FROM TAKING OVER “QUEMOY AND MATSU” – 2 island archipelagos less than 2 miles off the Chinese coast and approximately 110 miles from the Taiwanese mainland??? And didn’t Nixon and Kennedy argue at length over who would be the toughest on China in defending Quemoy and Matsu militarily??? BTW, aren’t Quemoy and Matsu still governed by Taiwan today???

13. On p. 39, Rudd claims that “As various of its republics applied for NATO membership, Russia…..” so of the 14 Soviet Republics that formed the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which 2 or more (Rudd used the plural) does Rudd think applied for NATO membership???

14. Did Rudd neglect (p. 45) to refrain from making disparaging remarks about President Trump 45, talking about “the alternative universe of Trump” and “the midst of chaos”???

15. Does Rudd (pp. 45-48) exhibit his lack of understanding of the true cause of the 2008-2009 economic meltdown which was caused by America exporting jobs to China since 1992 and which would have occurred whether or not there had ever been a subprime mortgage???

16. Does Chapter 3 list and summarize Xi Jinping’s 10 most-important priorities, which Rudd calls “concentric circles”?

17. Surprise, surprise, does Chapter 4 posit that Xi’s No. 1 priority is ensuring the Communist Party remains permanently in power and Xi remains its paramount leader???

18. In this regard, is Xi haunted by the demise of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union?

19. Is Xi’s core challenge whether loosening political control will be necessary to achieve his goals of raising China’s standard of living?

20. Has Xi identified 7 topics which he banned from academic discussions – universal values, freedom of speech, civil rights, civil society, the historical errors of the Communist Party, crony capitalism and judicial independence? Did he also launch a war on religious faith (which principally comprises more than 100 million Protestant Christians)?

21. Per Rudd, is Xi using high tech to achieve Orwellian “Big Brother Is Watching” control over the population? BTW is this issue the subject of a www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org Sec. 3 (Possible Topics for Future Meetings) proposal – “NYC Harvard Club Book Promotion – ‘Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control’”?

22. Does Chapter 5 posit that Xi’s No. 2 priority is securing national unity? By “national unity” is Rudd NOT referring to public opinion, BUT RATHER PRINCIPALLY to Taiwan whose re-unification would give Xi “a level of politically immortality in the eyes of the party and country that rivals Mao” AND ALSO Chinese Turkestan (aka Sinkiang Province, now spelled Xinjiang) and Inner Mongolia?

23. Surprise, surprise, does Chapter 6 posit that Xi’s No. 3 priority is ensuring economic prosperity and the political stability that he believes it fundamentally provides??? Though isn’t it interesting that it isn’t his No. 2 priority ahead of re-unification with Taiwan???

24. Does this mean eliminating poverty and raising living standards to developed-country standards and increasing government social programs for education, health and the aged?

25. BTW, does this sound a lot like the goals of any civilized country??? With the possible exception of care for the aged which in the Western world is associated with the Catholic idea that suicide is a sin (courtesy of Saint Augustine’s resolve to stop the Christian practice of mass suicide during the first three centuries whenever a Chirstian cell was discovered by the Romans and feared losing their nerve while being “tossed to the lions” and Augustine’s invention of the notion that suicide violated the Commandment that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” which in Hebrew actually meant “Thou Shalt Not Murder”)???

26. And isn’t care for the aged unusual for Buddhist societies (or formerly Buddhist, in the case of China) in which the aged are supposed to recognize when they are no longer “pulling their weight” and commit hari-kiri???

27. Is Rudd duped into yet again claiming (p. 104) that China is “wrestling with…..impose (ing) new carbon constraints on China’s previous economic development model to deal with the now accepted reality of climate change”??? [Re “yet again” please see Q-1’s reference to Rudd on p. 5 rhapsodizing over “…..shared American and Chinese concerns for…..the impacts of climate change” and Rudd's pp.14-15 claim that solving climate change is the third of three goals of a “framework” for Chinese-American relations.]

28. In addition to citing no evidence of this, how can Rudd so cavalierly ignore the facts that China is by far the world’s largest carbon polluter and that Obama’s 2015 Paris Climate Accord (like its predecessor, The Kyoto Protocol of 1997) does NOT obligate China “to lift a finger” until the far-distant future, if ever???

29. Didn’t AP report (https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-p ... cffa25354a) that China began construction in 2024 on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-fired electric plants???

30. Since the average size of a coal-fired electric plant in the U.S. is only 667 megawatts (i.e., 0.67 gigawatts), doesn’t the AP stat imply that China began construction in 2024 of 142 new coal-fired electric plants???

31. So is it surprising that Wikipedia reports (“Coal Fired Power Station”) that “Over half of global coal-fired generation in 2020 occurred in China, and coal provided approximately 60% of electricity in China…..”???

32. Shouldn’t Rudd, for such transgressions, publicly resign his credentials as an alleged historian???

33. Is Xi’s concept of common prosperity (p. 114) a complete “about face” from the policy of Deng Xioping (China’s paramount leader 1978-1989) that it is OK to let some people and some regions get rich first?

34. Has China’s demographic of having too few children to maintain the population led it (p. 117) to increase its one-child-per-family limit to three with the prospect that the limit will be scrapped altogether??? Will this work since young Chinese seem to echo the sentiment of Western youth that the cost of raising a child is prohibitively expensive???

35. Is Rudd “starry eyed” that China’s policy of “technological self-reliance” (pp. 127-132) will no longer rely on outright technology theft and on technology piracy (forcing Western companies, as the price of access to China’s workers or markets), to share their technology???

36. Isn’t Rudd’s Chapter 7 (Xi’s supposed No. 4 priority of combating climate change) a complete farce since Rudd rhapsodizes over a 2020 Xi speech to the UN General Assembly that China will achieve carbon neutrality before 2060???

37. After all, wasn’t Xi born 6/15/1953 so he presumably will be long gone (age 107 in 2060) by that time and his successor(s) can simply shrug off his 2020 “dream”???

38. Does Chapter 8 (Xi’s No. 5 priority of “modernizing” the Chinese military) contain any surprises??? Other than that this priority includes expanding it exponentially???

39. Is Xi’x new priority of sea power over land power surprising in view of China’s GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY (aka Belt-and-Road Initiative)???

40. BTW don’t Rudd’s nuclear stats for China (pp. 167-172) which included only 290 nuclear warheads in 2020, demonstrate how far it was behind Ukraine in 1994 when Ukraine surrendered its position as the world’s THIRD-LARGEST NUCLEAR POWER (behind the U.S. and Russia, but ahead of the U.K., France, China, etc.) by giving up its 1,900 MULTIPLE-WARHEAD NUCLEAR MISSILES in exchange for a worthless-though-signed U.S. and British guarantee of its independence and territorial integrity???

41. Does Chapter 9 (Xi’s No. 6 priority of “Managing China’s Neighborhood”) exclude Taiwan, the reunification of which was already Xi’s No. 2 priority???

42. Are there any surprises in Chapter 9’s review of China’s relationships to Russia, India, Japan, the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia???

43. Other than Rudd’s ignoring China’s relationship to Rudd’s Australia (as if to lull China to sleep that China shouldn’t be focused at all on Australia???)???