“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Lou lectured his audience. “We’ll see how frightened America is.”

Forty years ago this New Year’s Day, one of the most historic moments in the history of U.S. diplomacy occurred: the United States and the People’s Republic of China ended their thirty-year estrangement and established formal diplomatic relations with one another. The exchange of ambassadors and opening up of embassies in Washington and Beijing was one of the crowning achievements of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the end result of diplomatic spadework sparked by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger seven years earlier.

While China’s ambassador to the United States was celebrating the forty-year anniversary with conciliatory words in the pages of USA Today and President Xi Jinping was writing to President Donald Trump in the hope of jumpstarting a more productive relationship in 2019, a Chinese admiral was pontificating about sinking American aircraft carriers in the open ocean. Speaking at a military conference in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on December 20, Rear Adm. Lou Yuan boldly asserted that China’s anti-ship missiles could sink a U.S. carrier as easy as a snake could swallow a mouse. Whereas the U.S. and Chinese governments generally use military-to-military talks and diplomatic channels to avoid confrontation in one of the most critical waterways on the planet, Admiral Lou’s solution to the territorial dispute is nothing short of the exertion of full Chinese military hegemony in the region.

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Lou lectured his audience. “We’ll see how frightened America is.”

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/would-china-really-try-sink-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-40667