I don't think this is realistic. A few thoughts in no particular order:

- War is logistics and you're talking about trying to get involved in a war, that would necessitate supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles.

- China is extremely technologically advanced with the largest military in the world, by a wide margin.

- China is the at-scale manufacturing king of the world. In a shift to a war economy, nobody would be able to come even remotely close to competing. They parallel the US in WW2 in a number of ways.

- China is a nuclear power, meaning getting involved is going to be Ukraine style indirect aid to try to avoid direct conflict and nuclear escalation.

- Any attempt to engage in things like sanctions would likely hurt the sanctioners significantly more than China.

- The "rest of the world" you're referring to is the anglosphere, EU, and a few oddballs like Japan or South Korea. This makes up less than 15% of the world, and declining.

- War fatigue is real. The US really wanted to invade Syria, but no matter how hard we beat the war drums, people just weren't down with it. I think this is because people saw major echoes of Iraq at the time, and Taiwan will have a far louder echo of Ukraine. This isn't a show many people will be enthusiastic about rerunning.

> That depends on how cowardly the rest of the world acts if/when the time comes.

Or how weary of not having access to TSMC the rest of the world is.

looks at Ukraine, its white people and NATO wont fight for it. how about another group of chinse vs chinese in far far away? and the global south supports china more?

rightly or wrongly, I'm quite confident the US will not go to war with China if it invades Taiwan - the American people simply wouldn't support it. It's one thing to get public support for dropping a few bombs on a tiny opponent with little risk, as the US regularly does, it's another entirely to go to war with a major power with a very high casualty rate. The US wouldn't have even entered WW2 (as much as the administration may have wanted to) if the Japanese hadn't foolishly attacked Pearl Harbor and then Germany declared war as well. But unlike Japan and Germany, China has the manufacturing capacity and access to raw resources that would make it a very different enemy.

You really believe that "the rest of the world" countries should conscript citizens and go to war to help Taiwan? Most people if faced with this choice would direct you to the place where the sun does not shine.

Based on how cowardly the world acted when Russia invaded Ukraine (and continues to act) I don't have much hope for Taiwan.

Not really. The world got other problems. Europe is out for now, since we got Fascists at our doorstep trying to conquer Ukraine. The US has the orange clown as president, who is cozy with Putin. I don't think you can ascribe it to others being cowards, if "the world" doesn't react to protect Taiwan. It is right at China's doorstep. The logistic imbalance of trying to protect Taiwan, being this close to China is insane.

In the end, if a war happens, it will be idiotic again, from an economical point of view and from a humanitarian point of view. Economically, of course it will cost huge amount of resources to conquer Taiwan, and it will only disturb trade and what is already established on Taiwan. From a humanitarian point of view, of course many people will die.

The smartest China could do, would be to return to a soft power approach, and continue to develop mainland China, to continue to rival and even surpass Taiwan/Taipei. There are many young people, who don't have the walls in their minds, that the older population has. They don't want war, they want their freedom, and they want a high living standard. All this would be theoretically possible, if China didn't let ideology rule, but instead went for the economically best route, which is most certainly not an invasion.

This thread casually talks about Taiwan being a vassal state of the US during a civil war and Hong Kong being a colony of the British. Yet the world, largely the global south, should intervene and help the global north to exploit the rest of the world more?

Every one gets that far away countries across the world can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US. However when it comes to China, that is not only acceptable but it’s the anti-cowardly move to support outsider aggressors.