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What are the odds China moves on Taiwan in the next 12 months?
The Ukraine war seems to be ushering in a major political realignment in the West. Previously staunch pacifists are penning pieces about how they went from left to center-left, as yesterday's liberals become today's neoliberals and tomorrow's neocons. The circle of life turns, I suppose? It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards. Noah Smith is writing hawkish piece after hawkish piece claiming we've entered a new cold war, with a new Axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea opposing America and NATO & Friends. He linked to this article making the case for a new cold war, and specifically China moving on Taiwan:
Most of the time, the arguments I see putting China's invasion 5-10 years in the future focus on the second scenario and claim China is still lacking amphibious materiel/experience to pull off a D-day tier invasion. I've only rarely seen the third possibility discussed, but it seems much more likely. The recent military exercises to point in this direction.
This is all wildly outside of my lane. What do people think the odds are that China instigates some kind of blockade or customs control over Taiwan in the next 12 months? The bull case:
The bear case:
I'm interested in whether people think this is largely driven by Gell-Mann amnesia and I'm being irrationally swayed by an increasingly hawkish media environment/overly focused on domestic US politics, or whether the odds of China invading are much higher than people seem to think (although I could only find a betting market for a hot-invasion).
My understanding is the opposite, that rates of change favor the mainland. Taiwan and America are already highly developed without much room to grow, and also with far smaller absolute numbers of talented human capital. The longer time goes on, the easier it would be to wage war.
That fits with all sabre-rattling and state visits that started about ten years ago. In 2010 China and Taiwan were signing trade pacts. By 2014 there was a likely attempted color revolution in Hong Kong. In Taiwan there was the Sunflower Movement.
It's not in the mainland's interest for such things to happen. They wanted the trade pact that the Sunflower Movement occupied the legislature to block.
There sure were a lot of opposition movements furthering American interests in 2014. We also saw them in Ukraine and Venezuela.
I'll also add another scenario in case of war that's more akin to the Sudetanland. The RoC is more than just Taiwan, and some of their territory is closer to mainland China than Martha's Vineyard is to Massachusetts. The Kinmen islands are a bridgable distance from Fujian province, just a couple of miles. The PLA shelled these islands with ground-based artillery in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
You'd take those first just to see how the enemy reacts, no?
I don’t think China is likely to catch up with America. Their GDP growth rate is decelerating, their population is declining, and Xi seems to care more about his political security than economic growth, since he’s been snuffing out billionaires as rivals. Their GDP annual growth might realistically fall to 2% within 15 years. Considering their current GDP per capita is comparable to Malaysia or Argentina, and their GDP growth is stalling, I don’t see how they can catch up to the US. If anything, I predict the gap will grow wider.
Why do you think GDP is the relevant measure of catching up with America?
It’s more relevant than PPP, that’s for sure. China is a fairly poor country, comparable with Mexico or Argentina. People have been saying that China will “catch up” to the US for years, but it’s never panned out. It’s looking like China has peaked in terms of GDP growth rate, and they didn’t even manage to achieve a Japanese or South Korean level of wealth before doing so.
It being more relevant than another measure (why?) is not an argument that it is relevant in absolute terms, and the rest of your post seems to be another assertion that China's GDP is low. I find the continuous mention of GDP in these discussions about hypothetical military clashes very frustrating, because nobody ever explains why a measure that counts the number of tokens of socially constructed value exchanged for goods and services that mostly have nothing to do with military capability has anything with military capability.
At the extreme, a country that abolished money and markets completely, stopped exporting and importing and just press-ganged its people into producing sustenance and ordnance like an ant colony would seemingly have a GDP of zero, but clearly nonzero military power...? For a real example, Afghanistan's GDP appears to hover at around $20b per year. Total US expenditures on the war are given as around $2000b over 20 years, so why did the US lose? If you think Afghanistan was somehow exceptional and the US didn't fight for real but just wasted money on nation-building or something instead, a similar calculation holds for Vietnam where it's hard to find an argument that the US didn't throw everything that they could muster short of nukes at the North.
Coming from people who are ideologically committed to the token exchange system, the whole thing really winds up sounding like "the Albigensians stand no chance against our crusaders, since their Gross Devotional Prayer index as measured by our clerics has been way behind ours for decades", "Google stock is bound to prevail over Apple because their workforce is more diverse" or any other invocation of a metric that is about goodness as measured in terms of the speaker's value system, with the gap to the question at hand being implicitly bridged by the just world hypothesis (the arc of history must surely bend towards those with superior key market indicators/Christian devotion/wokeness).
We crushed Afghanistan: one of our easiest conquests, we lost about 13 guys conquering that country. Sure it was expensive to hold onto it for two decades, but conquering it was a cakewalk. Since we have no plans to conquer and rule China as imperial overlords, the occupation costs don’t really come into it: when it comes to winning battles, bignum GDP sure did crush nonum GDP like a bug.
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