China is emulating Nazi Germany in that it is now a totalitarian state that allows free enterprise and is extremely nationalistic. Conscious of its growing strength, it is now expanding its borders and acting aggressively.

Australia wants to build a new fleet of 12 submarines, ostensibly to protect us from Chinese expansionism. Why then are we allowing tens of thousands of Chinese to immigrate to Australia if we think that a war with China is possible? The idea that people completely forsake their national, cultural, and religious loyalties the moment they enter a western country blew up with the London Underground bombing.

If you think that war with another race is possible, allowing them to cross your moat and set up shop in your keep looks like insanity to me. Better to keep them away from your walls and start stacking stones on the ramparts.

SPQR and LEGO and other small-minded folk are spear-heading the new Hate-China brigade.

Yeah, the U.S. needs small-minded folks like them to enable its fear-inducing propaganda to spread across the world. The fear lubricates its 'Attack and Occupy' doctrine which, based on endless war, is aimed at gaining control of the whole world.

And one way to create fear is to create a bogey-man nation, like it once did with RUSSIA, then KOREA, then VIETNAM, followed by IRAQ, then by most of the Muslim nations in the Middle East. China is its new target!

And why does it want to control the world? Well, it loves the idea of having total power. Then it can gorge itself on all the world's resources and dominate world trade and turn sovereign nations everywhere into minions which it can bleed dry!

If the world is to ever experience peace, we have to stop hate-mongering. This will require intelligent people rather than the conga-line of mindless minions that believe anything they are told no matter how ridiculous it is.

China is not evil. Visit there and you'll find a happy people going about their lives the same as we do. The Chinese who live in Australia are model citizens who are not into terrorism because they're too involved with helping their kids to fit into Australian society.

Let's pour scorn on the mindless hate-mongers and encourage the peace-makers of which I'm one!

Reject hate. Show you have a brain!

Hi David,

Thanks for all your non sequiturs and tu quoque arguments.

There are disputes over bits of rock in the East and South China Seas. All other nations in the region are trying to maintain the status quo, while they negotiate with China. Only China is provoking other countries by occupying some of those bits, or driving out the fishing boats of other countries which have been using those areas for probably millenia, on the basis mainly that once upon a time, under the Mings or the Manchus, a Chinese ship may have visited some of those shoals.

Clearly China has a larger agenda, to claim all of those Seas as part of its national territory and bar any other claims, especially to the oil and gas underneath.

So they claim a shoal barely two hundred kilometres off the Philippine coast, and a thousand kilometres from China. Similarly the shoals down near Brunei and the southern Philippines.

On what grounds ? The good old arrogant, imperialist ones that once, one of their ships landed there. As usual, as good old imperialists, they ignore the well-known facts of inter-nation trade going back thousands of years, right across the region between the eastern Indian coast, the kingdoms of what is now Indonesia and Thailand, in fact right to Japan. There is an old Hindu temple near Manila, so are you suggesting that Filipino territory can be claimed by the current Indian government ?

Yes, that DOES sound completely silly, doesn't it ?

Actually, there was a mosque and a Hindu temple in Canton when Cheng Ho started out on his familiarisation journey with what was to the Chinese, an unfamiliar world, but one with which its component trading powers were long-familiar with. So should southern China be claimed by India and the Arab world ?

But let's not let history get in the way of power.

Joe

David G,

"And one way to create fear is to create a bogey-man nation, like it once did with RUSSIA,"

You really have a patronising attitude to the public in general, and commenters on this site, you apparently are the only person able to pierce the veil of US propaganda.

You really should choose your historical examples with much more care, the Soviet Union was one of history's great predators. Have you forgotten the Berlin Wall, the Eastern Bloc, the Gulags, the millions killed and oppressed by the Soviet regime? I'm old enough to remember the Cold War and believe me, I didn't need American propaganda to convince me that the regime was a threat. I have no idea what the future holds for our region, however your eulogising of China and designation of America as the "Great Satan" is particularly daft.

I and others, have pointed out that China, in contrast to the fantasies of its apologists, has a history of imperial expansion like any other Great Power.

The debate has nothing to do with "good" and "evil".

A disappointing comment from you, Loudmouth.

The nation that is trying to write the contemporary history of the world is the U.S. And it is using brute force to do it. It sticks its nose into virtually every conflict as it is doing by flying planes into the Chinese zone. Of course Britain has its claws into the Falklands and The Rock in Spain. The U.S. has its claws everywhere!

The future of the world relies upon a change of thinking, Loudmouth. We've been locked into the historic war paradigm for far too long. The idea of nations dominating other nations is barbaric. The building of a huge army by the Americans so they can bully the world is the same as that of Hitler when he made his grab for world domination.

And power corrupts as the U.S. clearly shows with its spying, its rendition and torture, its use of depleted uranium and phosphorous munition and Agent Orange and napalm, its putting people in cages, its non-involvement in the World Court. It stands for nothing anymore!

What is required is a new way of thinking, a new breed of people who reject war completely, who see it for what it is: a barbaric process that keeps humans locked into a pointless cycle of death and destruction.

I would've thought you would've been at the forefront of such a change, Loudmouth, rather than joining the discordant chorus of Flat Earthers that hang around OLO like jackals around a lion kill!

David,

Well, it's not 'the Chinese zone' yet. But China's provocative actions have made that area near the Senkaku/Diaoyou Islands a region of concern to any country whose lances, or whose nationals, may be flying in that zone. How does a commercial plane fly to Taiwan now, or to South Korea, except by flying across that 'zone' ?

I'm sure the US currently has a border disagreement with some other country at the moment, perhaps Canada or Mexico, or Cuba. But it hasn't aggravated the situation by declaring to be its own what the rest of the world regards as uncontroversial territory, land or sea that its planes can fly over from point A to point B without worrying about being shot down.

Imperialism is an outmoded evil, whether it is Manchu or American or Ruritanian. Either way, China has no special right to inflame international situations. It has no particular right to be imperialist - it's not a game in which big nations take turns. The Manchus have not had any claim on those islands near Taiwan since the 1890s. Or should we go along with reviving every absurd claim of every erstwhile empire ?

You may support Chinese (or rather, Manchu) imperialism, David, but it's not that kind of world any more. It's a world of multiple sovereignty, of big and small nations, and of diplomacy. Your big friend should get used to it.

Let's reject the threat of war completely :)

Joe