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China

The Atheist said:
Which is correct and the outcome might be different as a result.
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Yes, it might be. But how and why? You still have not said. Saying things might be different tells us nothing of use if you don't say what that difference might be.

Which has the potential to create conflict.
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Do you think it would? Why? Note that I'm not saying you are wrong. Rather, you have not said enough to even evaluate. I don't know if I agree or disagree with you because I don't even know what you think, because you haven't even said.
 
The Atheist said:
[a possible midair collision] has the potential to create conflict.
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I'm trying to figure out where this idea comes from.

Chinese and American warplanes have collided in the past, without creating conflict. A Russian fighter recently collided with an American surveillance drone, and it didn't create conflict. An American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and it didn't create conflict. Turkey shot down a Russian fighter not too long ago, and it didn't create conflict. A Chinese Coast Guard vessel rammed a Philippine Coast Guard vessel just last week, and it didn't create conflict.

Hell, in the middle of the Syrian Civil War, the US wiped out a company of Wagner stormtroopers, and it didn't create conflict.

In all these cases, and many, many similar cases, there was already some amount of conflict, between the parties involved. In a lot of these cases, the conflict is a big part of why the collision or shoot-down happened at all.

I'm trying to remember the last time an incident like this created a fresh conflict, or significantly escalated a conflict already in progress.

9/11?
 
Ziggurat said:
Yes, it might be. But how and why? You still have not said. Saying things might be different tells us nothing of use if you don't say what that difference might be.
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As I've already pointed out, I'm not psychic, but it seems pretty obvious to me that size does matter when it comes to war games.

America is much more likely to try to throw its weight around against badly-armed countries who don't have WMD. Iraq, Afghanistan and ISIS are three good examples.

China and USA are at far more of a touch-paper now than they were 20 years ago. If there is a collision and Xi decides to retaliate by shooting down a couple of planes, I'm not in the least convinced America would - or could - do much about it. Without an insane **** like Trump in power, a nuclear response is out of the question, so what would America do?

It might be nothing different would happen next time a collision occurs, but as China gets closer to parity in strategic weapons, the chances of a different outcome rise.

I'm astonished to need to explain all that.

Ziggurat said:
Do you think it would? Why? Note that I'm not saying you are wrong. Rather, you have not said enough to even evaluate. I don't know if I agree or disagree with you because I don't even know what you think, because you haven't even said.
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Now I've laid it out for you.

The flip side of what might happen also depends on whether the extreme proximity incident was an authorised manoeuvre, or whether a pilot decided to be a smart guy and get that close. If it's the former, then it raises the prospect that China might then start shooting down planes in their exclusion zone. If it's the latter, I wouldn't want to be that guy.

theprestige said:
I'm trying to figure out where this idea comes from.
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History.

theprestige said:
I'm trying to remember the last time an incident like this created a fresh conflict, or significantly escalated a conflict already in progress.

9/11?
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Asked and answered.

In more historical terms, I believe there was a boat got sunk once that got America involved in a worldwide conflict and the response to Little Big Horn was a touch OTT.

I'd also definitely include Iraq, because Saddam didn't even attack America, he just said stuff they didn't like. The enormous irony in that one was that you didn't topple him when you were at war with Iraq and then thought afterwards "Heck, we should have done that!" and went and did it anyway.
 
The Atheist said:
As I've already pointed out, I'm not psychic, but it seems pretty obvious to me that size does matter when it comes to war games.
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We're still talking about a midair collision, not a war.

America is much more likely to try to throw its weight around against badly-armed countries who don't have WMD.
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OK, so now you're finally starting to make a point. But China had nuclear weapons starting back in the 60's. They were very much a nuclear power when the prior midair collision happened. How much do you think we were really throwing our weight around militarily? Then as now, I suspect the issue of trade was much more important than the threat of military reprisal.

China and USA are at far more of a touch-paper now than they were 20 years ago. If there is a collision and Xi decides to retaliate by shooting down a couple of planes, I'm not in the least convinced America would - or could - do much about it.
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Of course we could do a lot about it. We can defend our planes, and we can shoot down their planes. And our planes are still a **** of a lot better than their planes.

Would we do that? Don't know, but one of the things you don't seem to have considered is the fact that we've got a lot more tools in our toolbox than just our military. China is still heavily dependent upon US markets and US technology, far more than we're dependent on China. Were China to actually directly and intentionally kill Americans, do you really think we wouldn't be willing to hit them with even more trade restrictions? That's really not a hard sell to the American public under such conditions. We could collapse their economy without firing a single bullet, and it's teetering on the brink as it is, in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago. Yeah, their economy is a lot bigger now, but it's also a lot more precarious.

Without an insane **** like Trump in power, a nuclear response is out of the question, so what would America do?
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If you want more non-nuclear military options: blockade. Just close the Strait of Malaca to any China-bound oil tankers, and they're up **** creek. They can't project naval power out that far.
 
I thought this was interesting: a paper about a statistical analysis of which American movies are most likely to be censored in China.

I saw it on marginal revolution, the blog of one of the paper's authors:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/censorship-of-u-s-movies-in-china.html

Quotes from the paper:

We introduce a structural econometric model to estimate the extent to which the Chinese government bans U.S. movies. According to our estimates, if a movie has characteristics similar to the median movie in our sample, then the probability is approximately 0.91 that the Chinese government will ban it. During our sample period, 1994-2019, U.S. movies comprised about 28 percent of the Chinese market and sales were about $22.6 billion. However, according to our estimates, if the Chinese government had not banned any U.S. movies, then the latter numbers would have risen to 68 percent and $45.1 billion.
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…, two factors that have very high statistical significance are: (i) whether the movie contains occult content, and (ii) whether the movie
receives an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The factors also have very high substantive significance. For instance, suppose two movies, A and B, are identical except that movie A contains occult content, while B does not. Suppose movie B’s probability of being banned is 50%. Then, according to our results, the occult content in movie A causes its probability of being banned to rise to 67%. A similar thought experiment implies that, if a movie has an R rating, then this raises its probability of being banned from 50% to 70%.

Three other factors seem to be important but come just short of reaching statistical significance. These are whether the movie contains themes related to (i) anti-communism, (ii) individualism, or (iii) Tibet. A fourth factor is similar. This is whether the actor Richard Gere appears in the movie.
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arthwollipot said:
Without reading the whole paper, do they define the term "occult content"?
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I've actually only read the above excepts and I actually can't open the link to the paper (seems to be blocked from here in China), but it's here. So I don't know the answer to that question, but would also be curious if others do.
 
It seems they used IMDB metadata
Our variable occult equals one if the movie has at least one of the following phrases as a plot keyword: “occult,” “monster,” "ghost," "witch," "witchcraft," or "zombie."
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arthwollipot said:
Ironic that a paper about what movies are likely to be censored in China is censored in China.
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Yep.

The censorship can actually get pretty funny sometimes. I watch TV and Movies on Youku, which is sort of like YouTube, but also does streaming. They have a pretty big selection of English language movies, but a much smaller selection of TV series. (the selection of Chinese language stuff is much larger).

I watched Friends recently, and it's hilarious how certain topics get cut out of the episodes. Some episodes get cut so much that they end up 10-12 minutes long, though most are mostly intact. The things that get cut the most are mentions of homosexuality. Whenever Ross' lesbian ex-wife's lesbianism is mentions explicitly, it gets cut. But if it's implied that seems to be okay and stays in. Also Phoebe's surrogate pregnancy was a no-no. There's an episode where I think this is introduced and it ends up cut to the point of incoherency. As a viewer you just have no idea what's going on, and I could only sort of figure it out because I vaguely remembered some things from having seen the show when it first aired.
 
The Atheist said:
Quite interesting: China tech firm claimed it could hack [UK] Foreign Office.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68372568
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In the interest of saving you a click:
A Chinese cyber security firm claimed it had the ability to hack the UK's Foreign Office, leaked documents suggest.

[...]

i-Soon is one of many private companies that provide cyber security services for China's military, police and security services.

It employs less than 25 staff at its Shanghai headquarters.

The collection of 577 documents and chat logs were leaked on GitHub - an online developer platform - on 16 February.​

Hahaha.

First of all, I'd be surprised if the UK Foreign Office is notably unhackable. I'm sure any motivated cybersecurity firm on the planet could hack it if they wanted to.

But that's not why I'm laughing. I'm laughing because the info was leaked from GitHub. This is funny to me because GitHub is probably much less hackable than the Foreign Office. But it does have certain features that make it easy for careless or ignorant users to expose their secrets to anyone making a legitimate query.

For example, careless developers will include authentication keys in their code. This then gets published, and anyone who cares can grab those keys and unlock whatever it is they're supposed to control.

Github publishes a running log of accounts that have been updated. Anyone can read those longs, and then read the public accounts that have been recently updated. If those accounts carelessly have secrets in them, those secrets are now public. If the public account includes authentication keys for private accounts, anyone who cares now has access to those private accounts and the further secrets they contain.

This is actually a pretty commonplace scenario, since github repositories very often cross-build with other github repositories. Cross-building between a public account and a private account can expose the private accounts auth keys in your public logs, if you're careless about such things. Another commonplace scenario is builds that integrate with Amazon Web Services. A careless developer can expose their AWS auth keys, and give anyone who cares access to their AWS account(s). Building a bot farm or dark web node in someone else's AWS account is tight!

So, to me, the fact that this came to light from a GitHub leak is hilarious. It says more about the incompetence of the i-Soon "cyber security" team, than it does about the people responsible for cyber security at the Foreign Office.
 
American studios seem not to try to cater to the CCP like once they did. I understnad that, privately they think the China market will be gone in a few years anyway.
Not that they ever made that much from it, they could only take around 15 to 20% of the gross out of the country.
 
China created more prosperity, and faster, than the US ever did, proving the claim that laissez-faire capitalism is the only true way to run an economy ( it never was).
Gloating that China isn't growing as fast as it used to is like laughing at a runner slowing down after he beat you in a race.
 
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