China’s public is used to seeing flashy footage of its armed forces parading new weaponry through Beijing, conducting peacekeeping patrols in Africa or staging elaborate drills around disputed territory, especially Taiwan.
But nobody under 45 can claim to have lived through an actual Chinese military strike on another country. And among older generations who did, most would rather forget the war of 1979 in which Vietnam repelled a Chinese invasion.
No wonder, then, that many Chinese people were transfixed by reports of America’s dramatic night-time extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.
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