alt Hacker NewsIs time on their side?
Long term: demographics are worsening for China relative to now or 5 years ago.
Short term: China doesn’t yet have viable homegrown replacements for ASML, TSMC, etc.
Really short term: China blockading Taiwan and suffering the economic fallout would be much more painful than US blockading Cuba/Venezuela/etc.
A decisive kinetic action or a very soft political action, rather than a blockade seems more viable in the current state.
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My point is that China can sustain a naval blockade of Taiwan nearly indefinitely, and at some point Taiwan will have to decide whether they want to live under siege forever (poor, cold, getting everything via scarce and expensive air freight), or give up come to a political solution.
I'm not like, rooting for this, I'm just trying to be realistic.
There's some intersection point between long term decreasing in China's ability (demographic collapse) and long term increase in China's ability (their current build up of military hardware in air, land, and sea that is currently outpacing America's). Maybe somewhere in 10-20 years where their regional military power is much higher than America can project across the Atlantic but they still have a lot of military aged men.