>>213725509This is unquestionably China's worst naval defeat since the Battle of the Yalu River 1894, and possibly an even bigger humiliation than Operation Sindoor, the sinking of the Moskva, the F-18 losses in the Red Sea, and the USS Fitzgerald and John S. McCain. They are never going to recover from this.
On the eve of that battle, most Western observers would have told you that the Beiyang Fleet was indisputably the most powerful in the region by the weight of its battle line. The IJN had nothing even remotely close to its two German-built ironclad capital ships. What happened next would completely shatter that perception, and with it any hopes for Qing China or its successor states, whether the ROC and PRC, of ever being able to challenge Japan in eastern waters for the rest of the 20th Century.
That is the scale of the defeat which the Philippines inflicted on the PLAN and CCG yesterday. India and the US may be able to buy new aircraft and fix the hulls of the damaged DDGs, but the catastrophe that has been inflicted on China today is worse than any material loss: it is the end of its naval ambitions for the next 100 years