I mean, it's nothing compared to the internal speeches that China gives its troops. Heck it's nothing compared to the speeches Xi gives internally to troops. Chinese troops are currently training on their missile corp on models of US aircraft carriers.
That's been going on for decades, and supposedly the balloons are nothing new. What's changed is the USA response, in terms of the American general's rhetoric and the coverage and downing of balloons. So there's been a shift on the part of the USA.
That's a lie. It started in 2012 but it took until the middle of the 2010s before they started openly threatening war. This is not some status quo situation that the US General upended. China's been escalating toward war since Xi took over. I mean before Xi it was hide your strength bide your time.
Different than threatening war with US. Edit and yes, it stepped up in 2012 when Xi took over. Started with Japan and has migrated to aggression against US and allies.
Edit: Taiwan crisis wasn't great, but it ended when the US sailed an aircraft carrier through Strait of Taiwan. So while it wasn't great, it wasn't like they were threatening war against US.
Some of the propaganda videos people are posting on douyin (OG tiktok) are hilarious (even if the historical events they're inspired by are very serious). It's interesting to compare foreign propaganda about the US military to US propaganda about foreign militaries.
Why would you need to police population in case of war for returning Taiwan? It will be very popular war and you definitely won't need to lock people down.
Look at Russia as an example. The war has been longer and less popular than expected and economic sanctions have hurt the working class the most.
China imports 66%-75% of its oil. That would drop dramatically in a hot war, as oil imports via the South China Sea would likely be blocked. This would require any imports to sail around Australia, which would likely be stopped by the US.
Russia would happily sell China oil, but it doesn't produce nearly enough to cover the gap.
If anything, war is much more popular in Russia than expected. There are no widespread protests, draft went ok, etc. Putin is still popular.
I do not think oil is such a big problem. China import is 10mln barrels while Russia exports is 5mln barrels, Kazakhstan is 1.2mln barrels. I am sure they can transport Iranian oil if needed. What will also happen is that Russia will buy oil on international market to resell to China. There is no infrastructure now to transport that much oil but it can be built surprisingly fast. Germany just demonstrated that it's possible to built LNG terminal in six months. If you ignore property rights and all enviromental regulation and enlist military you can built trans-asia pipeline in a few months. China can also import oil thru Vietnam.
Like everything I think this is at least a half truth. COVID did happen but probably not intentionally. And then China (And a few other countries) saw it as a great excuse to try a few things out on the general population and see what they could get away with.
As with speculation about US Covid measures being some kind of training or testing for god-knows-what crazy thing, the political and economic costs of the measures are far too high for those to make any sense as major motivations.
My understanding is their vaccine doesn't work at all, they don't have a strong emergency medical care system, thus it was the only real option for them.
Edit: Chinese propaganda video of attack on Guam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBOho1AOKYY
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36598/chinese-air-forc...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-builds-mockups-us-...