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Let’s talk about East vs West, the narrative of the “inevitable rise of China,” and some of the historical reasons why the West is currently ascendant. Pasting a post from SQS by @RandomRanger:
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Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.
China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.
Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers
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Do we see China reversing these tendencies? How will a Trump presidency change things?
What does the future of Taiwan and AI, chips, etc look like at the moment? Is Deepseek really as good as they say?
My theory is that Taiwan needs a miracle to survive if the Chinese go in.
Before WW2, Japan had been planning for war with America for many years. The plan was to lure the US fleet out into Japanese waters, slowly eating away at them with submarines and land-based bomber attacks before a decisive battle where Japan would hold the upper hand. Then the US started building an absolutely gigantic fleet set for 1942, blocked Japanese oil imports and the Japanese realized they were doomed unless they got in a huge first strike, so they switched to the Pearl Harbour strategy. The initial Japanese execution was excellent but the US eventually overwhelmed them with tonnage and weight of numbers (plus some qualitative superiority too by the end).
Japan fixated around the wrong things. Why would the American fleet deploy to quickly reinforce the Philippines and accept these risks? Why would the US give up after one decisive battle? 'Who has the better battleship' wasn't that important to the outcome, it was mostly about size.
Nearly all discussion of a Taiwan war revolves around the amphibious campaign, measured in days and weeks. But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition. We should think about attrition and mass rather than a single decisive battle.
Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to attrition. It's an island with virtually no domestic energy production, no fertilizer production and maybe 20-30% food self-sufficiency. China may not be able to successfully invade. Amphibious campaigns are hard. But all they need to do is bomb Taiwanese ports to prevent resupply. Taiwan will be forced to capitulate. You can't run a country with no food and no power. China won't get the fabs (the US will blow them up if it looked likely) but they will get the island and the people. The island is an important base, it's important politically and the people are the real reason behind TSMC's success. And all China needs to do to win this slow victory is fire off enough missiles at Taiwan's ports to break through any defence, they need only to avoid complete US victory in Chinese home waters.
Considering China's gigantic industrial capacity, they should easily be capable of darkening the skies of East Asia with missiles and drones. They're the biggest shipbuilder in the world, the biggest producer of drones and test more missiles than anyone else. China has built up huge reserves of fuel and food, they start much closer to self-sufficiency and enjoy overland trade routes, they're far better prepared for blockade than Taiwan.
China would of course prefer a knockout victory where their marines raise the flag over Taipei, they would prefer not to need to impose rationing or conduct a large-scale industrial mobilization. But if a quick victory doesn't seem practical, like the US in 1941, they'll double down and rely on industrial mass to win. They'll do what Putin did but x20, due to their size. That's the scenario we need to avoid.
Palantir's recent ad where they show a bunch of drones blowing up a presumably Chinese fleet at the push of a button is the crux of the problem. The US and gang doesn't just need to do this, we need to do this and prevent it being done to a bunch of big, slow freighters: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1868633675190939839
Destroying an enemy's economy qpurely through air and missile strikes is much harder than it sounds at first. Most notably, in ww2 the battle for britain and later allied mass strategic bombing failed to cripple enemy war production. German production actually inncreased year over year despite daily strategic bombing raids.
Israel russia and ukraine have shown that modern air defense is effective against current threats. Short of a full scale desert storm style air war, air defenses will remain intact and the vast majority of long range missiles will be intercepted and destroyed.
Carrying out an actual blockade of Taiwan would likely require winning a head on engagement against US naval forces. This might be plausible, but if China chooses this it would be a direct act of war against the US.
That was 70 years ago, with dumb bombs and a partial blockade. Germany had overland trade with Europe, Britain had its empire and considerable domestic energy and agriculture. They were both much more self-sufficient than Taiwan is today. German war production only started mobilizing seriously in 1943 and 1944, that's what the Sportspalast speech was all about.
Smart missiles and modern sensors make it much much harder for big, slow freighters to reach ports. Satellites, radar and sonar systems are far more advanced, they'd be like sitting ducks. And ports are big, stationary targets. China can hit them with relatively simple land-based MLRS systems, let alone their huge ballistic missile arsenal. How can you offload food and fuel while being bombed and shelled?
Missile defence on the necessary scale is impractical right now. Firstly, the Russian (and Iranian) missile arsenal pales in comparison to the Chinese arsenal. The latter has immense industrial capacity and can surely churn out ludicrous numbers of missiles. There are rumours going around that they have single factories that can produce 1000 missiles a day at full capacity (though precisely what kind of missile they're talking about is unclear, China tends to be secretive about these things).
Regardless, Desert Storm will immediately be eclipsed.
Furthermore, Ukraine's power grid has been put under a great deal of pressure by the Russian missile barrage. They are heavily reliant upon European energy imports to stabilize what remains of their grid (which was overbuilt for Soviet industrial needs, so there was lots of surplus capacity). Ukraine also has a number of nuclear reactors that Russia understandably doesn't want to cause great damage to, so they have to take care in their targeting. Taiwan doesn't have these factors. Taiwan can't import power. They have no coal mines or gas fields. Nobody can send over a bunch of transformers and power equipment to make up for what's lost.
And finally my point is that China doesn't need to defeat the US navy, they only need to avoid defeat. I can envision a scenario where China loses its carriers and much of its surface fleet but still wins the war. As long as they can prevent the US getting sufficient control of the seas to resupply Taiwan, the latter will have to capitulate. It's easy to deny, harder to defeat. The US is moving towards a strategy of denial, the victory plan is 'sink the Chinese invasion fleet and win the war'. My point is that sinking the invasion fleet is necessary but not sufficient.
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