[ngcc_hk]

One of the strange move by china is to go pacific. It is a land empire. Hence if you think through it and given there is actual war between Soviet Union and china, why not point upwards and get back Siberia. Or somehow effectively get that by letting Russia dig shit in Ukraine and get their material cheap.

It is understandable to try to break the pacific ring but fighting a war on the sea … even if it won, can it be sustainable? Is there any material in Pacific Ocean easily obtainable?

For the M strait the pacific rim is really a different ball game. The whole strait is surrounded by countries which will not give up their coastline. The sea and land belt thing is mostly to bypass it?

The whole move is wrong. I have spoken.

[paganel]

> You don't have a realistic understanding of the situation. Rail links are limited,

I do have a realistic understanding of the situation, see for example this article from back in 1973, Le Transsibérien [1], published in the French Revue Défense Nationale. It's basically a French lieutenant-colonel who took the Trans-Siberian Railway and who came back with some lived experience and with some statistics. Back then the Trans-Siberian alone was responsible for 9% of the internal rail traffic from the entire world, I'm pretty sure that 50 years later and with a doubling of the rail connection between European Russian and the Far-East Russia the stats are pretty much the same, if not better.

Like I said, I know that rail is a little more expensive compared to sea transport, but nothing that can't be dealt with given the context of a world war.

> why not point upwards and get back Siberia

Not every big country on this planet has the same natural resources-focused imperialist views like the Western countries have.

Forgot to mention about the Trans-Siberian, supposedly the Soviets built the 2-lane railway bridges at some distance one from the other, meaning one lane from the other lane, so that an aerial bomb attack taking out one of those railway bridges wouldn't have taken out both lanes at the same time. It's small things like that demonstrate the strategic long-term thinking of some societies.

[1] https://www.defnat.com/e-RDN/vue-article.php?carticle=1454&c...

Later edit: Sorry, meant as a reply for the above poster, HN should implement a "Delete" option sooner rather than later...

[nradov]

The geography around most of the China/Russia border sucks. It would be tough to push through a mechanized invasion force even with numerical superiority. They previously fought a few limited border skirmishes with neither side able to make much progress. Even if China somehow managed to take part of Siberia the technical challenges and logistics would limit what they can actually extract. And of course the Russians would nuke Beijing before they surrender part of their core sovereign territory.