They need a fighter capable of reaching out and keeping Americans away, with low chance of frontal or near-angle detection, and thus the ability to carry ship-killer and AWACS/Airtanker-killer missiles inside launch range. They designed that fighter.

Some dogfighting ability is nice, and they have some, plus a smarter way to keep their infrared seeker heads out of the weapon bay (so it can acquire targets) without major compromise of stealth from the open bay doors. Something the F-22 cannot do well – though the F-35 can.

The Chinese designed the fighter they needed – not the F-22, F-35, Su-57, or anything else. Looks to me like they did OK. The real challenge will be the sub-millimeter fit levels needed to realize a design’s stealth. Not a Chinese strength, offhand. You can fix that with putties, et., but then maintenance per flight hour zooms up and readiness drops. If you want ace-card dash and kill attacks on ships and AWACS, even that might be OK.

Whether a piece of kit is “good” or not depends entirely on what you want it for.

Even the F-35 could be “good,” if it was only expected to handle certain specific missions. Its problem is that it’s expected to take on a whole set of missions to which its design is poorly suited, for reasons we need not reiterate here.

Read Albion’s Seed. America never had a culture. It had regions with distinctly different cultures, with some aspects overlapping. Even today, if you ask ten different people to define what an American is, you’ll get ten different answers.

The United States will bust up, and the fragments will form cultures that will endure. But none of them will be “American”.

What about the fact that the Chinese are buying up really important real estate like ports in other countries? They lend money they know is not going to be paid back and buy government properties for dirt cheap.

The Chinese learned very well from the “Economic Hitman” practices of the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s. They now understand debt-based imperialism, and they use it as a weapon. I am impressed by how fast they learn to use the weapons of others – though it must be stressed that original thinking is no longer a particularly strong Chinese trait, from what I have seen, at either an individual or national level.

What about the other indirect wars China ia fighting?

Of course. The Chinese have no problems with selling drugs and weapons. They are a low-trust culture and are not in the least bit offended by the notion of selling people the rope with which they will hang themselves. In this respect, they are no different from American or European drug companies – see e.g. Purdue Pharma and the oxycontin scandal.

When I was studying in the U.K, I was in a University where a lot of Chinese people also studied. Guys were looking too effeminate and pretty much every woman and man was walking around like a robot with their faces buried in their phones. It’s death by entertainment.

Yes. Things have gotten much worse since the first time I arrived in the UK, and the US. Huxley figured out how humanity would lose its freedoms in Brave New World – though in his version it was all due to soma. Our version of the same thing is a smartphone.

American culture will only endure if it adapts and sheds some of the nonsense that it has accumulated over the past 100 years or so. Americans will need to abandon the civnattery and equalitarian idiocy that has infected it, and will need to move to an openly nationalistic, Christian, race-aware way of thinking. Once that happens, I anticipate that at least some of the nations that come after America will prosper and thrive. Those that specifically adopt a forward-looking, offensive (in every sense of the word), Christian nationalist approach will be fine. Those that do not, will fail.

What about the other indirect wars China ia fighting? They sell quite a lot of fentanyl that even the Mexican cartels are buying. I’m sure they do more, but these days, the real wars are being fought over spirit as opposed to guns.

I remember someone half jokingly saying that men don’t fight wars because they smoke too much marijuana, watch porn and play video games.

The funny thing is, the Chinese is playing this type of game against them. When I was studying in the U.K, I was in a University where a lot of Chinese people also studied. Guys were looking too effeminate and pretty much every woman and man was walking around like a robot with their faces buried in their phones. It’s death by entertainment.