Those who have lived through the cold war. Is China as big of a threat to the US as Soviet Russia?

20 comments

1. No. We had fallout shelters in communities to prepare for the possibility of nuclear war. China’s a trade partner, not a threat.

2. No. The Chinese aren’t interested in pushing their ideology on the world like the USSR was. They want to be the big dog and have total control of China. As long as they get a cut of the money from overseas and get their ass kissed China’s happy. Plus, they can’t come to blows with us without fucking their own economy and rising the standards of living in China is the only reason the CCP is tolerated.

3. Not even close. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be, but today it is not. The Soviet Union was much more aggressive and expansionist militarily. That doesn’t mean I would want to be a citizen of China, though.

4. I didn’t live through the cold war but I can tell you know. We used to live in the shadow of looming nuclear holocaust. The Chinese government has become more and more adversarial to us, but they are still dependent on us to a large degree, especially now with their looming economic problems. While war with China is a possibility, it wasn’t as imminent as war with Russia was during the cold war.

5. Not yet, not really. China doesn’t have a tenth of the number of warheads as the USSR did and so much of their economy is tied to ours. The Red Army was battle tested as opposed to the current PLA. Neither Xi nor any American president is talking about what may happen that would result in a nuclear exchange.

   Even with how they’ve been performing in Ukraine, Russia is still the one I’m worried might try and inadvertently escalate a situation into a nuclear exchange.

6. The United States and the Soviet Union each had *tens of thousands* of nuclear warheads in inventory through much of the Cold War. Even today, the U.S. and Russia have a combined total of around 10,000 nuclear warheads.

   China has around 410 nuclear warheads.

   So, no.

7. During the cold war, we kept hearing from some elements of our own society that the Western way of life was ending, the Russians would take over, and that we needed to prepare ourselves for our inevitable decline into mediocrity.

   (I honestly think that’s why Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech is so poorly remembered: to a country constantly hearing about the superiority of the Soviet Union, it seemed like a call to lay down and die, rather than a commentary on the energy crisis.)

   We don’t see this today with China.

   I mean, yes, we still see elements of our society going on about the inferiority of the Western way of life–but it seems to have become an internalized criticism of certain aspects of the west, rather than call to defeat and inevitable surrender. And with China, the threat seems regional (as China wants to be a major regional player rather than a world-wide superpower), and it seems economic and military, rather than a moral existential threat.

   —-

   Don’t get me wrong; a nuke is a nuke. But China seems to be interested in power for its own sake, rather than in capturing and converting our very souls.

8. Hi. 53m here. Lived through the last two decades of the Cold War.

   The People’s Republic of China is NOT as large of a threat to the United States as the Soviet Union.

   The USSR was a continental empire with thousands of nuclear warheads and an expansionist agenda. Not just in territory but ideologically. For most of the Cold War they were interested in disrupting the Western order.

   The PRC is interested in supplanting the United States in some ways but a more defensive outlook in others. The bulk of China’s military and security resources are aimed at maintaining internal security. Yes, they have built a large navy, even larger than the US Navy to attempt to control the seas around China. However, they are outclassed by US and allied navies.

   On top of all that, they are having internal issues that weaken them further.

9. No.

   The current times are somewhat reminiscent of it, but only somewhat. As others have said, the USSR was at a whole different level.

10. China is the biggest threat.

11. Not the existential threat the USSR was. The Soviets could kill millions of us in a minute, China is playing a longer game.

12. No. We are China’s biggest trading partner.

13. In a military sense? The Soviets. We, and they constantly had bombers on alert and raced to have so many nukes ready combined we could destroy the world many times over, and we largely did not trade with them so there was no sense of “we need them”, whereas with China we are largely dependent upon each other for trade.

    China however is a larger threat to global hegemony and due to their much greater success with infultrating our institutions and influencing our youth a greater threat to our core way of life. The Soviets didn’t have tik tok and armies of people pretending to be western commenting about the ills of capitalism and the joys of communism everywhere a young impressionable mind looks.

14. No, but the rise of Chinese nationalism under Xi-the-Pooh is scary as hell

15. Nuclear threat? No. Our economies are too heavily linked.

    In other ways? Possibly. They’ve made inroads into many fields by stealing technology from us, which they then use to undermine our economy. They’re exerting cultural influence on us in several ways, not the least being how movie studies are having to kowtow to them. And of course tiktok. And they’re buying up a lot of the US.

    Where the USSR was content to saber rattle, China has taken a much subtler approach to conquest.

16. USSR was Nuclear war and China is more of a economic war and cyber war. If the west pulled manufacturing out of China they are crippled so the threat is on a precarious balance.

17. I was really young at the time, but I still remember seeing a news reporter interviewing a solder in front of missiles that were pointed at the US so they could launch them right away.

18. One thing to know about China is just about all of their advancement in the past few decades has been from their US bequeathed manufacturing economy. This has both boosted their status and also created a symbiotic relationship that aided in peaceful relationship.

    We are now moving our manufacturing to other more friendly countries like India and Vietnam as they have become too big for their britches stealing our intellectual property and taking liberty in the South China Sea.

19. I am 55 and the Soviet Union was a bigger threat.

    When I was a kid in the 1970s and a teen in the 1980s, there was a very real fear that the Soviets would drop the bomb on us unilaterally if they had a bad day. I was taught that the only reason they didn’t was because of mutually assured destruction.

    They were very open about their hatred of the United States. I highly recommend people learning about how the US and the Soviet Union were (nominally) allies during World War II and became mortal enemies right after. Hint: Stalin was a bad dude.

    Another factor is that the Soviets were a true dictatorial command economy. China doesn’t have free and open elections but they are not strictly a command economy. They adopted capitalism a long time ago and their economy is very much tied to the United States’s economy.

    Another factor in all of this is access to information. When I was a kid, I did not know that so many Soviets were standing in breadlines. I thought they were doing OK with their mostly agricultural economy.

    There was one news outlet, Pravda. We didn’t have the Internet or 24/7 news channels. Nowadays, we know much more about China. We don’t know the real story about a lot of things but Xi doesn’t have an iron tight grip that stops information from getting disseminated online. And we don’t have an iron tight grip on information flowing all around the world about us.

    One last thing about China and Taiwan – it’s not a good situation, but it’s not the Cuban missile crisis and I don’t think it will ever reach that level.

20. The Soviet Union was more of a threat, however China can do A LOT of damage to the US if war were to break out. Maybe not nuclear apocalypse level destruction, but maybe Vietnam war level casualties and dozens of ships lost.