The South China Sea is becoming a very tense area of operations for the US Navy.

In a great saber-rattling exercise, the Chinese Navy has deployed its largest fleet ever to the region, over 40 naval vessels, including its only aircraft carrier.

I believe this major show of force is, more than anything else, a butthurt response to President Trump’s proposal to impose import tariffs. The Chinese are not happy about the idea of American manufacturers being competitive. They believe they have a right to unrestricted access to the American consumer market. THEY DON’T!

For decades, the Chinese have been given a free trade ride with unrestricted access to the most valuable thing in the history of the planet, the American consumer market, and they don’t want to see that end. Tough sh!t. America First!

We the People, via our consumer market, have made China rich. We have been transferring our wealth to the Chinese since the 1970s. As I explained in an article I wrote on the subject five years ago, if we continue giving China free access to our markets, in 20 years China will look like the America of the 1960s and America will look like the China of the 1960s. Not good, unless you are Chinese.

So, we can continue on the path our political leaders have been leading us down for decades and commit economic suicide or we can revive our own manufacturing sector and let the Chinese worry about the Chinese while We the People look after America.

From Conservative Tribune

Most American media might be consumed with teenagers stomping their feet about gun control these days, but American and international military planners are keeping their eyes on a large Chinese naval deployment in the South China Sea this week, reports

And the Chinese knew the world was watching.

According to Reuters, at least 40 Chinese naval vessels — including an aircraft carrier — embarked on a very public show of force in the South China Sea this week.

Satellite images show a flotilla led by submarines in “a line formation more suited to visual propaganda than hard military maneuvers,” Reuters reported.

The flotilla included China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, flanked by support vessels with aircraft overhead.

“It’s an incredible picture,” Jeffrey Lewis, a security expert at the California-based based Middlebury Institute of Strategic Studies, told Reuters.

“That’s the big news to me. Confirmation that, yes, the carrier participated in the exercise.”

According to Stars and Stripes, China announced it would be holding training exercises in the region, which would sound fairly routine if it hadn’t been for bellicose statements coming out of China’s leadership recently, as well as ongoing tensions with the United States Navy.

It was only last week that Chinese President Xi Jinping used the closing of the 13th National People’s Congress — the communist country’s “parliament” — to declare that China is “ready to fight a bloody battle” to defend its place in the world, according to CNN.

So, that’s where Kim Jong Un learned all the bluster.

The speech also may have contained a veiled threat regarding the independence of Taiwan, a country the United States is committed to defending, but which China considers to be a breakaway province.

“We should safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and achieve full unification of the motherland,” Xi said, according to CNN. Unification, he said, is “the aspiration of all Chinese people.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Global Times, an English-language tabloid published by the Chinese government, a Chinese “military expert and TV commentator” said the naval drills aren’t targeted at any particular country, but his language might have made readers think the intentions were not exactly peaceful.

The navy of China’s People’s Liberation Army is clearly preparing for action.

“The South China Sea and East China Sea will be primary battlegrounds. The PLA is committed to be battle-ready through simulated combat training,” Song Zhongping told the Global Times.

This isn’t like having some retired admiral tell a Fox News interviewer what the U.S. military might be up to. The Chinese media is controlled by the government. If a government-run newspaper wants a security official quoted as talking about “primary battlegrounds,” it means the Chinese government wants everyone to know it’s thinking about actual battlegrounds.

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