Originally Posted by glyn

Originally Posted by entropy

Many of us still believe God is male!

Originally Posted by glyn

Originally Posted by gunnut

You mean you don't think that now?

Originally Posted by entropy

Many of us still believe God is male!

Originally Posted by Zhang Fei

Here's where I'll have to disagree. Unlike Westerners, the average Chinese doesn't really care about casualties as long as it's somebody else's family members doing the dying.

But the Chinese population is large enough that even if tens of thousands die, too few families will be affected to have any real negative impact on morale and therefore support for the invasion effort.

In fact, casualties in which the average family's sole offspring is KIA might even rally support for the invasion effort on the part of the bereaved families. After all, how is that only child's death to mean anything if the invasion effort falls on its face? In addition, the Chinese military can't exactly draft the deceased soldier's non-existent siblings for a prolonged war effort, can it?

Originally Posted by Zhang Fei

The reason the Chinese public is so warlike is because the government censors non-warlike points of view - in textbooks, newspapers, tv, radio stations, on the internet, etc and arrests those who promote other points of view. In a democracy, opposing points of view would presumably counterbalance the more martial viewpoints. What I consistently see in the Chinese media is a rah-rah consensus about Chinese wealth that leads them to think that on a per capita basis, China is one of the richest nations in East Asia rather than one of the poorest, which it is, in reality. There is also the consistent trumpeting of China's military strength, which has led to the public's over-estimation of its capabilities, especially in regard to power projection - most Chinese I have spoken to believe the PLA could overrun all of East Asia without a problem, never mind Taiwan. This limited access to countervailing viewpoints would change if China became a democracy. (Note that I don't consider a country without either free speech or a free press a democracy).

Originally Posted by Zhang Fei

Let me suggest again that Chinese students (i.e. innocent demonstrators) getting killed by armored units vs large numbers of Chinese soldiers getting killed in combat are two different things. The first suggests that Chinese leaders are a bunch of bloodthirsty murderers with no compunction about slaughtering the innocent (and in Chinese culture, students are by definition innocent). The second may simply be bad luck (combined with good intentions) easily forgiven just as the Chinese populace forgave the Communist Party the tens of millions of dead from the twin Party-made disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. If they'll believe the Party's explanation for the deaths of tens of millions, which coincided with great hardship on the part of most of the Chinese population, why would they question its explanation for battle deaths, whatever this explanation turns out to be?