Pictures emerge of a PLA stealthy jet powered drone purposed it seems at least in part for naval aviation use that looks exactly like the stealthy jet powered drone Northop Gruman is building for the US Navy. Ah, yes. One wonders what's going to happen when we wake up on that not too distant day to find China through cyber espionage and malfeasance has stolen everything of value from us so as to use it against us and work our relative demise. Will there be outrage? Acquiescence? Is the public just too stupid and ignorant to care or understand the significance of things? Will we say, more in sadness than anger, that China has found the weak spot of capitalist based, free market driven democracy, ie when it comes to the allure of the burgeoning mass of potential Chinese consumers everything is for sale, including sovereignty, and simply accept our fate?
Questions are coming that we don't at all seem prepared to answer. For example, what happens when a state sponsored Chinese company steals from some future Apple plans for a game changing device and then releases this device as its own before Apple can bring it to market? Will that be a cause for war? The rules are changing, no one I think knows if such could amount to a casus belli - but if the theft is big enough and it is state sponsored, why not? I get the feeling many in the American business community and gov't do not want to think about such things, choose to embrace a sunnier view of the future focused as they are on the profits to be made - but the clouds are coming and they'll have their day.
There's little doubt that many of China's elite, possibly all of China's elite view the PRC's disreputable actions as merely the justifiable cognate of how the imperial powers of Europe behaved and how imperial America behaved - WWII was in reality just a gov't sponsored initiative to promote American business interests etc etc - and there are certainly many, many intellects festooning left wing academia throughout the West that would agree with that judgment - but arguing the validity of such views is not my point - my point is so long as China remains a closed, oligarchic, socialist state a confrontation with the open, democratic, rule of law West somewhere down the road is a virtual certainty and whether we like it or not a choice will be forced upon us: defend our principles or give up.
