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Letters | Best for China to play geopolitical weiqi and Russia chess with other countries
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Why you can trust SCMP
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A Russian reading Suzanne Ho’s letter (“How China is beating the US in geopolitical board game”, January 31) would naturally think of chess instead of weiqi.
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But geopolitically, there is a difference between Chinese commodities appearing abroad and our soldiers landing there. I watched a 2014 internet video of our Russian military helicopters flying into Crimea, which resembled a famous scene from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
Likewise, publicly Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen but almost never heard, in spite of his quite impressive physique, while our relatively diminutive President Vladimir Putin has declared that Russia’s border “doesn’t end anywhere”.
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Russia kicks off Kavkaz 2020 military exercises with China, Iran, Belarus and others
Russia kicks off Kavkaz 2020 military exercises with China, Iran, Belarus and others
So as long as China and Russia play weiqi and chess respectively with other countries and not with each other they are safe. A conflict between the two tactics was best described by our poet Pushkin who wrote: “I’ll buy everything, said gold; I’ll take everything, said steel.”
Mergen Mongush, Moscow
Nuclear briefcase custom shows world is far from peace
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It’s a tragedy and an indicator of crude, hostile global rivalry that a briefcase is handed to an incoming leader of the United States containing nuclear codes that could kill millions of innocent human beings. We’ve got to become more rational and sophisticated.
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