You cripple your argument with your own. The US can't return to a 2500 year old structure; it's not old enough to have that history.
Which is a strength. China has further to fall than the US. That old history is still history. The US would cobble together into something more reminiscent of something later into history by virtue of a shorter memory span...whether or not that is beneficial in this hypothetical future is a different question.
The People's Republic of China isn't 2500 years old either. Your metaphors about strength, falling, shoe repair, structures, and crippling have no predictive power, being only metaphors.
It's true that people in the US don't know what happened there 2500 years ago, but people in China don't know much of what happened there 2500 years ago either (partly the fault of Qin Shi Huang), and in either place, there's no particular reason to expect it to happen again, other than metaphorical fuzzy thinking about falling and cobbling, and the general tendency of human societies to do things that human societies can do instead of things they can't.
Even if post-apocalyptic China were seized with a historical-reenactment fervor and Sima Qian were the new bestselling author, the material conditions of production today are quite different from those that prevailed in the Bronze Age. People won't suddenly forget how to use their shortwave radios, smelt iron, and make gunpowder just because it's radioactive outside. At least some surveillance satellites will surely remain in orbit. Semiarticulated trucks with tank escorts could still carry materiel to battlefronts orders of magnitude faster than porters with wheelbarrows or even the Grand Canal. The whole scenario is just nonsense.
kragen says "People won't suddenly forget how to use their shortwave radios, smelt iron, and make gunpowder just because it's radioactive outside. "
shortwave radios? With no electrical power, no batteries?
"smelt iron" with coal, maybe! Now you've got wrought iron, which is good for what, horseshoes? Hedge your bets and buy a couple of horses tomorrow. [Bad news: I can imagine your neighbors' queries: "Hey, Bing, what's with the sudden interest in horses, eh? You aren't worried about some crazy sort of apocalypse, are ya? Whaddaya gonna do - ride off into the sunset or sumthin'?" Good news: you can eat a horse!]
"Make gunpowder" - for what, other than to blow up any remaining local CCP leaders. But it would be easier and more satisfying to kill them by hand.
"surveillance satellites"? where do you download data? Why? Where are the encryption codes? Most CCP command structures would be smoked.
"Semi-articulated trucks with tank escorts" is a laugh - with no diesel/gas, no repair facilities and no roads.
"to battlefields"? What battlefields? Oh, of course, so they can fight the Chinese living in the next valley. But before they do that, how about getting something to eat? Maybe you could roll up to the local Kentucky Fried Chicken in your 'semi-articulated truck'!8-))
"The whole scenario is just nonsense." - finally you got one right! What you envision _is_ nonsense.
The point of my post was that for a post-apocalyptic China, geography is destiny. The country would be fragmented socially and politically out of necessity. The most likely political structure to result is one that supports a more primitive infrastructure. China would fall into a number of separate independent regions. The CCP might survive somewhere but more likely would be snuffed out by the people, who would not appreciate the war the CCP had brought upon them.
> shortwave radios? With no electrical power, no batteries?
Nuclear retaliation might take 20 minutes. The diesel UPS will last that long.
What would the aftermath look like months or years later, though?
Big coal power plants might be targeted, but most solar panels will continue to work; those can run shortwave radios for decades, giving you transcontinental and intercontinental logistical coordination capabilities Duke Huan of Chen would have sold his soul for. Moreover, a Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes; if a backup of your private keys survived on your phone, you can transmit money to anyone anywhere in the world who promises to send you a nice F-14 or two.
> "smelt iron" with what - coal maybe! Now you've got wrought iron, which is good for what,
Essentially all of the iron and steel in the world today is smelted with coal, just as most of it has been since the Song Dynasty switched their blast furnaces over from charcoal to fossil fuel 900 years ago. Modern minimills can of course produce higher-quality steel in electric arc furnaces, but they must start with iron. But there's a huge quantity of iron around; we aren't going back to using knives as money anytime soon.
> "Make gunpowder" - for what, other than to blow up any remaining local PRC leaders.
The tactics and strategy of the Warring States Period are inseparable from the weapons of the time. Even a small Haber-Bosch plant is sufficient to produce enough cordite to annihilate any army of antiquity or even medieval times. Any "warlord" who manages to organize such a thing in the months or years after a putative collapse would hail from the current power structure, which is to say, the Chinese Communist Party.
> "surveillance satellites"? where do you download data? Why?
The tactics and strategy of the Warring States Period are also inseparable from the reconnaissance technology of the time, which didn't even have cameras or telescopes, much less quadcopters, radio-controlled planes, helium balloons, bottle rockets, submarines, SR-71s, and surveillance satellites. No state which didn't have access to such things would be able to resist conquest by those that do. Even NOAA GOES imagery, which is transmitted unencrypted and routinely received by amateurs, would be a decisive strategic advantage over armies that lacked it.
> Most PRC command structures would be smoked.
It seems unlikely that the organization that defeated Japan alongside the Kuomintang, and then defeated the Kuomintang, is as incapable of contingency and succession planning as you seem to think.
> no diesel/gas, no repair facilities and no roads
You can blow holes in highways with atomic bombs; Tsar Bomba's fireball had a radius of 3.5 km, so it could probably interrupt a highway for a few kilometers. But you can't destroy a whole highway, much less all the highways across a whole country; not even the US has enough bombs. Similarly, you can't destroy all the diesel fuel or all the repair facilities in a whole country with just nukes.
What you can do is kill a lot of people. But you probably can't kill everybody in China without killing most of the people in allied countries as well: not just Taiwan, but Japan, Mongolia, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and plausibly most of Europe as well. Even then, it's likely that hardened facilities would survive.
> The PRC might survive somewhere but more likely would be snuffed out by the people, who would not appreciate the war the PRC had brought upon them
Did this happen in the Battle of Britain, with unappreciative British citizens blaming the Queen and Winston Churchill for the war they had brought upon them? Did it happen in Pearl Harbor, with the Hawaiians booting out the US Navy that had brought such a bombing upon them? Did it happen in the US occupation of Japan, with the Japanese populace angrily ripping Emperor Hirohito and his generals limb from limb as punishment for bringing American nuclear war upon them? Did it happen after 9/11, with the American people snuffing out George W. Bush's government? It's really unusual for a population to side with foreign invaders and bombers against their own elites.
More to the point, "snuffing out" a group requires organization and discipline. An army can do it, and a police force might be able to, but for "the people" to do it, they need some kind of organizational structure, which prioritizes and coordinates the snuffing. Guess what the organizational structure of mainland China is?
I fail to see how "shortwave radios" would be particularly useful for the 20 minutes of "nuclear retaliation",
Bitcoin transactions require networked computers which, again, won't be around w/o power/batteries, a working network, etc.
Implementing the Haber-Bosch process requires very sophisticated engineering, machining and careful operation. Lots of trial and error is involved.
simply making "cordite" is only one step in producing an artillery shell. There's the gun, it's transport, the shell casing, the primer, the aiming mechanism, etc. You must train the gunner, etc.
That "organization that defeated Japan" you speak of would most likely not be present (would be destroyed),
No need to kill everyone in China. Just the "A Ship" and they're all in Beijing. Pollution is bad there already and would be even worse after a nuclear war!8-))
One person can "snuff out" a group.
Why do I get the feeling I'm talking to a child who is fairly well-educated but has a patchy understanding of the real world, someone better at history than at science? Maybe someone who games a bit? I think I'll stop this dialogue here.
Well, the fool might be the guy who's been posting articles claiming covid is a hoax, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin cure covid, China secretly has an out-of-control covid epidemic, and wearing face masks is deadly: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=giardini
I'm not going to link to particular comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=giardini (it would be too easy to think I was cherry-picking the worst ones) but you can read through it yourself and see that the guy has a long history of almost nothing but incessant worthless trolling.
> I fail to see how "shortwave radios" would be particularly useful for the 20 minutes of "nuclear retaliation",
Correct, the fact that nuclear retaliation takes a few minutes, not months or years, means that your hypothetical disintegration scenario is irrelevant to my original point: in the event of a full-blown war between the USA and PRC, there will be no semiconductor fabs in the USA, foreign-owned or otherwise.
Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting to explore your postulated post-apocalyptic recapitulation of the Spring and Autumn Period, and shortwave radios are among the things that render it impossible.
I understand that it can be confusing to talk about two different hypothetical situations that happen at different times in the same hypothetical timeline. That's why I separated them into two paragraphs, with a one-sentence paragraph separating them, in order to keep you from confusing them: "The diesel UPS will last that long. What would the aftermath look like months or years later, though? Big coal power plants might be targeted, but most solar panels will continue to work; those can run shortwave radios for decades."
Perhaps repeating the point, as I have above, will have helped you to understand it better. I know it's confusing! But I have faith in you, Bunky!
> Bitcoin transactions require networked computers which, again, won't be around w/o power/batteries, a working network, etc.
This is not correct. Signing a Bitcoin transaction requires a computer, which does not have to be networked or powered on continuously. A small solar panel to charge your USB power bank is plenty of power. Once you have signed the transaction you do need to get it to the Bitcoin network somehow. Because it's a few hundred bytes and contains no secret data, you can base64 encode it and send it by skywave CW Morse code at 10 millibaud if you have to. Not that that would be necessary in practice.
> they're all in Beijing. Pollution is bad there already
It seems that your knowledge of current events in China is nearly as profound as your knowledge of cryptocurrencies, political science, and metallurgy.
> Why do I get the feeling I'm talking to a child who is fairly well-educated but has a patchy understanding of the real world, someone better at history than at science? Maybe someone who games a bit?
Probably because, being the person who said, "The CCP might survive somewhere but more likely would be snuffed out by the people, who would not appreciate the war the CCP had brought upon them," and "'smelt iron' with coal, maybe! Now you've got wrought iron, which is good for what, horseshoes?", you have no basis on which to judge my understanding except ego defense. And, I suppose, you're insecure enough about your maturity to imagine that likening someone a child is some kind of rhetorical power move that might compensate for your total lack of relevant knowledge and epistemic humility.
I did play D&D once, though, 30 years ago. And I played Settlers about once a month in the 02001-02006 period. So you're not entirely wrong.
I concede to you, O Master, that my thoughts are to Yours, as mere raindrops are to the Oceans of the World. Furthermore, as a token of our discussion, I offer this simple link so that you might someday smoke the Peace Pipe and Bury the Hatchet:
If I'd realized you were just trolling from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have bothered responding to you. I thought you were just uninformed, but I see that wasn't the problem.
Which is a strength. China has further to fall than the US. That old history is still history. The US would cobble together into something more reminiscent of something later into history by virtue of a shorter memory span...whether or not that is beneficial in this hypothetical future is a different question.