Summary
Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated in his New Year’s speech that Taiwan’s “reunification” with China is inevitable.
China has escalated military activity around Taiwan, including frequent incursions near the island and sanctions on U.S.-linked companies over arms sales to Taipei.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te rejected Beijing’s claims, stating Taiwan’s future can only be decided by its people.
Lai also criticized China’s restrictions on travel and education exchanges with Taiwan, calling for dignified, reciprocal relations based on goodwill and equality.
It is not the same though.
Firstly, Russians are inefficient and inept as fuck, Chinese are not.
Secondly, Ukraine had a strong support of both EU and the US. Now Trump is going to be in power and this cunt will happily let China take over Taiwan.
Thirdly, Ukraine is 600k km2. Taiwan is 36k.
Everyone in the lead up to the Russian invasion thought Russia had a world class army (besides some analysts like Philips O’Brien). Three day invasion is how many western analysts were spinning it (Michael Koffman is the one I remember talking about this). I think it is a stretch to believe that the Chinese military is any better, especially since their last fight was, what, in the 70s against Vietnam?
Ukraine doesn’t have a giant moat around it. Taiwan does. Amphibious warfare is much much much harder than land based war. Probably by like 2 orders of magnitude at least. Keeping an army supplied in that environment is very very hard and that was before drones made defense warfare extremely effective. The US stopped supplying weapons to Ukraine for a few months last year and they held the line quite well just with their drones.
China hasn’t fought an interstate war in decades. The last well known example was korea. All the other fights they had were with the soviets from 1950 to present. And they lost every one of those border wars
China is very very inexperienced when push comes to shove.
I am not going to claim I am a military expert because certainly I am not. I think your arguments don’t hold water though:
It is irrelevant what everyone thought, unless you are asserting Chinese army is as bad as Russian. If so, I would say unlikely on the basis of the entire technological development of both countries. There is also cultural aspect: I worked with number of Russians and Chinese. Russians were sloppy as fuck, nearly all of them. Chinese on the other hand were the most hard working people I have ever seen in my life, again almost all of them. Population size also matters.
Amphibious warfare is only harder until you land and secure even temporary harbour.
You are underestimating importance of western support. “just a few months” is not important - ask yourself where Ukraine would have been now if the US were to not supply anything to them from the very start - and this is the situation Trump is likely to put Taiwan in.
On point two you are correct only if the attacking force has air/sea supremacy like the us did in WWII. With drones I have a very hard time believing that will be the case. That is what makes it hard. Sure landings are brutal, but logistics is a nightmare when you have to supply your troops with vulnerable ships. That is why the Russian navy getting smacked about by Ukraine is so relevant.
It’s worth noting that there are limited spots you can land on the Taiwan coast for an assault, and they are heavily guarded.
It’s a very different war up until they can get and maintain a foothold.
Citation needed. The Chinese largely based their armed forces on the Russian model in a somewhat combined effort, so I suspect they’d be just as shit. It will be interesting to see how much of a fight Taiwan gives them.
On the second point I have no doubt Trump won’t intervene, however I do find it odd that Musk just finished fucking over the budget bill (whatever its name is) that would have helped fund chip manufacturing in the US just for them to simultaneously hand all Taiwanese chip manufacturing to China. It’s almost like they have no game plan…
They don’t.
Will he? Trump is soft on Russia but wasn’t he pretty hard on China?
Has he ever been tough on China when the cost him anything? Being hard on China has economic consequences.
Trump represents overt corporate oligarchy taking over America. Those people don’t care as long as they live comfortably. The US is building chip factories in the southwest to replace TSMC for domestic use. Once thats completed. Corpos don’t care about Russians and Chinese carving out spheres of influence across the world and killing millions. They only care about their own hides and the last reason to care about overseas affairs would have become redundant.
And this is the same scenario where millions of Americans are thrown into abject poverty by the deliberate crashing of the economy as technofascist corpos like Elon musk are allowed to shape the economy to their designs.
Once again. Those corporate only care about their own kind. Everyone else is expendable assets. Whether it be lower and middle class american citizens. Or entire countries. Panama. Canada. Mexico. Ukraine. Taiwan. You can’t appeal to the morals and nature of corporate oligarchs because they’d rather kill you for wasting their time.
Until he benefits personally, then he’s soft. All China would need to do is promise to sell Trump goods or let him build a gaudy hotel.
I would be stunned if he was to do anything.
Trump was hard on China until Ivanka got her patents approved. After that, he was remarkably friendly with them. And now Russia is friendly with China. I’m sure those tariffs will disappear once he’s been paid.