Where are we up to in China's timetable for going to war?  Numerous anecdotal reports suggest very high up.  In Hong Kong, to take just one example, the television airwaves are saturated with calls to war.  Here is one description from the comments section on this recent American Thinker article:

I have all the available mainland channels at my house. The news has been little more than order-of-battle information for the last six years. It seems they devote around 75% of news programming to it.

Popular TV shows are heavily weighted to past wars, especially the Second Sino-Japanese War, and military dramas. A current running commercial talks about the sacrifices the military has made (where????) and ends with a blind soldier in uniform saluting viewers with his missing right hand.

The population of China is being psychologically prepped for war. The author is probably correct that Vietnam is the first target and the Senkakus next or high on the list.

It would be hard to top having a blind, maimed soldier in your domestic propaganda, and it would be hard to back down from taking the propaganda to that pitch.  So China's internal propaganda is suggesting that China's war of choice is not too far off now.

One of the late Professor Samuel Huntington's astute observations was that "Islam has bloody borders."  That is just as true of China and literally true on its border with India as of June 15.  As per their established modus operandi, the Chinese set out to build structures on the Indian side of the border in order to change facts on the ground.  Established protocol is that troops along the border are unarmed with the result that there is a lot of pushing and shoving as the Indians try to stop Chinese encroachment, as per this video.

What reportedly happened in the Galwan Valley on June 15 is that the Chinese had promised to withdraw from their encroachment.  The Indian commanding officer with a party of 50 men went to the standoff point to check if the Chinese had retreated per their undertaking to do so.  The Indian soldiers proceeded to demolish and burn Chinese buildings on the Indian side of the border, including an observation post.  A Chinese force of 250 soldiers assembled, and the Indian soldiers physically stopped them from entering Indian territory.  The Chinese soldiers carried spiked sticks for this attack.

The result was that 20 Indian soldiers were battered and bled to death.  The incident has shades of the massacre of 64 unarmed Vietnamese soldiers standing in waist-deep water in the South China Sea by the Chinese Navy on March 14, 1988.

India's border with China is 2,520 miles long.  Russia's border with China is a little less at 2,264 miles.  Apparently, Russia's President Vladimir Putin was dismayed by the Galwan Valley incident as he would know that it is only a matter of time before China switches its neighborly love and attention to its northern border.  The last time Chinese troops killed Russian troops was on March 2, 1969, when Russian border guards were ambushed on Zhenbao Island in Far East Russia.  Russian losses from the incident were 58 killed and 94 wounded. 

It is unfortunate that Russia has been demonized for partisan political purposes in recent years.  The threat is not "Russia and China"; it is just China.  Standard geopolitical operating practice on the Eurasian landmass is to ally with the second power to thwart the first power, as we did in WWII.  And Stalin's Russia was a lot more odious than the current regime in power in Russia now.

On China's eastern front, aggression has been stepped up against Japan with incursions around the Senkaku Islands, now at over 100 per month for the last year.

China has no intention of living peaceably with anyone.  Prepare accordingly.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.