... and buy insurance. Contract for immediate armed response to the alarm if you really want somebody to get hurt.

So, at a time when orbital debris is very much a major problem for a sizable number of space-faring nations, the US forced China to create in LEO the largest and longest-lived debris field since the dawn of the space age, posing a hazard to everybody trying to operate there.

And they are complete and helpless victims of "open spying by satellites", with no spy satellites of their own.

When China finally reaches the modern era and actually lets its people have free access to information, such ignorant posts as yours might become less common. Well, no, this is Slashdot.

They were in talks to participate in the ISS. The ISS partners invited them in as potential responsible, collaborative partners in the future of manned space flight..

Then they conducted a reckless ASAT test at relatively high LEO altitudes and nearly doubled the number of trackable debris at that altitude [see Johnson Space Center's Orbital Debris Quarterly Newsletter for the chart]. At that altitude, the pieces of their defunct weather satellite will remain a hazard for many decades. That got them uninvited.

China needs to decide whether the PLA is running the show or not, and decide whether they want to be a responsible space-faring nation... or not.

An incredibly large number of things. People who don't do research for a living would be shocked to discover how many "facts" are taken on faith and never really subjected to any scrutiny. Then, one day, somebody does and it's a big discovery. The amazing part is how common it is.

What's somewhat related and very interesting is that the space shuttle often flies in the 200-300 km range of altitudes. We consider that "space", but it's right in the heart of the ionosphere in most places.

It's all a matter of perspective.

A thinner or closer ionosphere does not relate to scouring of the atmosphere by the solar wind. It is the Earth's natural magnetic field that protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by the supersonic solar wind.

A pending reversal of the Earth's magnetic dipole may somewhat increase atmospheric scouring, but you must remember that only the dipole moment is going to reverse direction. The higher order (e.g. quadrupole) moments won't go anywhere and will still deflect the solar wind. You'll just get aurora in unusual places for a while.

Right, and later on something will fail and it will explode unexpectedly.

The idea has been tried before (big surprise). The Russians used to deliberately blow up their satellites or rocket bodies, and in doing so produced an enormous amount of debris. They eventually saw that this wasn't the best idea.