been wondering about that myself actually

china still has a lot of unsettled border disputes with basically all their neighbors as well

I can't imagine 2 aircraft carriers would make a big difference in stopping a committed Taiwan invasion.

you should better familiarize yourself with the capabilities of an aircraft carrier attack group and how vulnerable anything bringing troop transports across the straits would be while that's within operational range of it

but more importantly, it's about playing a game of chicken - if there are a few subs or destroyers there they can't really have any meaningful engagement so they'd hold back or withdraw or just be taken out via light skirmishing immediately if they engaged

the us could tolerate losing a destroyer or a few subs and not declare WWIII

an aircraft carrier attack group would not be a light skirmish but an all out slugfest - there's no such thing as light skirmishing if they engaged - so the real deterrent isn't that aircraft carrier itself, but that it represents many more which would be dispatched if anything happened to it

even in the most optimistic projections of the other side getting overwhelmed in a one sided battle and then calling it quits - the economic repercussions from severing our economic ties would be severe

but really, neither side would get out unscathed - which is why China is extremely unlikely to occupy taiwan if there is a carrier group nearby and likewise why the US would be extremely unlikely to intervene if china rapidly took taiwan while we had no carriers in the region - we'll play wwiii chicken to prevent something from happening, but zero chance we're sending in troops to liberate something already occupied

Dont forget china's military all havethe coronavirus too

assuming thats the intention.

thats INSANE

It's bizarre that an offhand drunken comment about the cops gets you the medieval chair treatment--but the wet markets are 'lightly regulated' lol

i think what people have a tough time understanding is those markets

A. don't sell anything like bat (all the bat kebab and bat soup videos are from indonesia)

B. are deeply engrained in the culture of the older people

telling some 60 year old granny that her preferred market is unsanitary is going to fly as well as telling some spring breaker in miami he's being selfish and spreading the virus - i imagine if they suddenly clamped down on them with heavy regulation it'd be unenforceable on a local level and move to the grey/black markets

i imagine they've decided it's easier to just let those markets continue to decline until the last one is run out of busines by a walmart, jingkelong or carrefour

young people don't shop at those markets

20 years ago china was nothing but those markets, now you need to really go out of your way to find them, they aren't common in the slightest but rather destination shopping done by old people who don't like change

i'm also super confused by the entire "wet" adjective, never once heard that before covid19

also, other asian countries are 10x worse, hence why all the shock videos are of markets from southeast asia because the chinese ones are pretty tame in their product lines, just fairly unsanitary compared to western standards

those markets in beijing won't have anything you wouldn't find in the US, up in the northeast you'd find some seafood items we don't eat and silk worms but those things are all eaten in japan and korea as well

go west and it's more like what you'd find in turkey

go south and it get's a little dicier but still, 99% of the food they item is the staple chicken/pork/beef and pepper/onion/potato stuff you'd find in the USA#1 - they do have some more of the exotic stuff but it's nothing out of this world crazy like you'd find in SEA

China: everything is fine

Also China: police on police violence

I don't know man, they've always been called wet markets where I'm from.
Are you saying no Chinese people eat bats? The same people that want ground rhinoceros horn and eat tiger penis? The Chinese and lots of people in Asia will eat anything that moves. Doesn't seem like a big deal.
Anyways, aren't the "experts" pretty sure that although bat in origin, the virus was passed on by an intermediary animal like a snake or pangolin and possibly that animal also added something to the strain?
Snake is on plenty of menus in the states.

what i mean to say is that if you flew to china you'd have to go to speciality places to get those foods, you'd have to specifically seek them out - otherwise you could spend years there and never run across them

like with that snake thing, while totally true, you'd have to go specifically looking for it and it'd be wildly incorrect to just assume that despite the presence of snake and alligator themed bbq competitions and restaurants that specialize in them that they are common

i'm sure you could eat bat in china, but you'd 100% have to do a lot of research before hand to figure out which restaurant would have it if it were even available in your city or province just as with snake, i've never eaten it, never seen it available, only know of one person who's eaten it because they did a post about it here on 2p2 and that's basically how most chinese interact with bat, it may exist but probably never once crossed their lives and they are unlikely to know where to get it or anyone that's eaten it

just looked it up, the wet thing is only in english, in chinese it's just market, and had to god in a dozen years living in asia the first time i heard the term wet market was when someone shared a video here in the thread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_soup

Not so uncommon in Hong Kong but it's not like they sell it at every corner either.

China takes wild animals off the menu amid coronavirus epidemic – does that mean no more snake soup or frog porridge?

hong kong/guangzhou is it's own little niche in the world of chinese cuisine and not at all representative of the rest of the country

ie you saw the guy in beijing say nothing would change while the guy in hk cried fowl

I bet if granny had a little chair time down in rm101 she might be open to sourcing her unicorn meat in a safer manner.

The thing I don't understand about the black market simply moving to say another country is--isn't part of the whole appeal that the food is killed fresh right there? Not very practical when your butcher is 2 countries over.

oh no like black market as in the market that is currently regulated and pays tax shuts down and new market pops up but pays off local officials and stays off the grid and then isn't regulated or paying taxes

china is extremely corrupt, so much that the one thing all the billionaires have in common is a close relative or a best friend in a regulatory position over their chosen industry

that bleeds down into the local level too, if they crack down too hard on something from the capital, that's more likely to just incentivize the market people to pay off local government regulating the markets who coincidentally is the uncle of one of the board members etc etc

18 hits in the COCA for wet market--almost all in reference to markets in Asia.

Wet markets are inherently more difficult, but not impossible to keep hygienic. The problem is China doesn’t even seem to be trying very hard to keep them hygienic. Same thing with wild life trade. You find wildlife in HK, Singapore and Japan too but in much safer conditions.

things getting a bit worse here for foreigners, some of the most viral news right now is 3 americans at a covid19 test center in quingdao who went to cut the line and got in a big fight and basically screamed f off chinese and it was all recorded by cell phones

noticing people not wanting to get on the elevator with me, not for social distancing - ie there are 6 people waiting, all to to go up and all 5 unrelated people will wait for the next one rather than ride in the first one

can not state enough how weird that is for china, people normally will literally force their way into elevators already packed like sardines - whether intentional or not, all the news reports about most new cases coming from abroad are definitely impacting people's reactions to me

You should explain to them that The WHO chairman declared, "stigma is much more dangerous than the virus." Once they understand this, I am sure they will see the error of their ways and things will quickly go back to normal.

Which wins in a lift, cough or fart?

In spain they advise us not to share elevators.

yeah that was the case but hasn't been for a while as Beijing hasn't had any new cases in well over a month - only new cases there are people arriving at airport but everyone flying in has mandatory 14 day quarantine

after 2 months of strict af living things are beginning to loosen up a little

Propaganda is working... latest going around is Italy had cases in September and the virus didn't originate in China. Also because the virus can cause brain damage (what do you think happens to the brain when you're coughing your lungs out and can't breath? duh), who believes it's not bioweapon (from US of course).

They are straight up going Russian/Trump firehose approach blasting people with wild conspiracy theories. And it's working.

Again, most Chinese people I talk to are expats that have spent a lot of time in US.

grizy have you been to china before?

If Chinese people get more xenophobic and aren't willing to travel to US/Europe as much, I think a lot of people here will be ok with that. Obviously it will hurt the neoliberal economy some, and hurt some industries such as tourism; but I think there is going to be a lot of (very justified) trepidation and concern of China exporting their next plague to the rest of the world.

And it seems reasonable that the economic losses could be offset by western countries investing more in domestic manufacturing. I think this has been a stark lesson the risks of outsourcing all your manufacturing capacity to a autocratic, non opaque 3rd world country.