If there are resources that can be gained from the ocean depths, the first thing you have to do is work out a way for humans to be able to work long in that environment without ill effects.

Of course, china will have to relty of stealing western tech as per usual, so they will not be able to go as far as they have with the space program, which is mostly modified soviet tech.

Perhaps.

Why is it that all those endeavours China undertakes lately have this typical western 1950s/60s "The world of the year 2000" air to them? Have they accumulated material since 1945 and now work through it by category?

Military - check

Economy - check

Fantastic world of tomorrow - getting there

@Strange

Communist work in some 5 year or so steps... For each 5 years they plan what will happen and how it

will happen etc... So yeah it would make sense...

Generaly:

I guess they found another solution for their overpopulation... just populate the bottom of the sea...

Plenty of dirt down there...

Presumably it'll flit between picking up bits of lightly barbecued spy satellite and snipping ocean cables?

@ RainForestGuppy:

Likely, but you won't read about it anywhere. We'll need to monitor that dope cloud from space (as the Chinese will).

Communist work in some 5 year or so steps... For each 5 years they plan what will happen and how it?

So do most successful businesses, does that make them Communist?

What about gunpowder? The chinese made all sorts of clever things a very long time ago, and yet so many of these technologies were never developed to the extent that European nationed managed.

Artillery and rocketry, anyone?

I'm not about to cast aspersions on the Chinese, but it might be nice if someone could give examples of interesting things they've created in the last 1000 years or so? Or better yet, the last 100?

The whales would be nervous. For now it's just the sea cucumbers freaking out

of The Spy Who Loved Me?

We have the underwater car (it's even a lotus) and now the underwater base.

All we need is for a 7 foot man with metal teeth and we're sorted.

'I'm not about to cast aspersions on the Chinese, but it might be nice if someone could give examples of interesting things they've created in the last 1000 years or so? Or better yet, the last 100?'

Ziyi Zhang???

Well *I* find her interesting ;)

The ability to rapidly gear up industrially, launching genuine competition in all manner of consumer goods against much more technologically advanced traditional powers such as the Western Europe and North America?

Sure, they haven't invented anything new, but they're sure kicking our asses making copies of the old stuff. Even if there's not a lot of innovation in shovels, for instance, you can sure make a bunch of money if you sell a billion of them.

"*Impressive, but some way short of the all-time record, achieved in 1960 by the US's bathyscaphe Trieste which, with its crew of two, hit the bottom of the Marianas Trench at 10,900m (35,800ft)."

Yes, but Trieste wasn't REALLY American - it was built by a French father and son, who built it in...the city of Trieste, France. They could not keep paying for it's improvements and upkeep however, and sold an interest in it to the US Navy. Flush with the cash of the Americans, the Frenchmen made some further improvements, and with the son piloting, he and an American Navy officer decended once, and only once, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. They disturbed some flatworms as they touched down, proving that life could exist at amazing depths, but conducted no other science. Hence, no one has returned, because we just didn't learn a hell of a lot.

If the Chinese need undersea tech, they certainly don't have to buy it from the US, they can always head to France and other EU states...

Just how hard is it to build an unmanned submersible on a long wire? (If the wire breaks, the sub stops what it is doing and returns to the surface.) As with space travel, many of the engineering challenges relate to keeping people alive in places where they should be dead. Unlike space travel, the long wire approach means you don't even need breakthroughs in AI.

uhuh huh yeah

militarily it's stupid. maybe they plan on basing supercavitating torpedoes as some sort of anti-naval invasion device. the Navy gave up on undersea bases when it became possible to launch highly accurate ICBM's from mobile submarines. That's why the liquid breathing and gill experiments (like in The Abyss) lost favor and were discontinued.

But for resource harvesting? Cmon. unmanned subs and servomechanisms have been tested and used for undersea work for decades. Anything that can be done underwater can be done by remote even better.

OK, who allowed the Chinese to play Deus Ex, and grab ideas?

//Svein