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Notes -
China could not have afforded to fight the US in a conventional war in the 1980s.
Who said anything about fighting the US? The US has never committed to defending Taiwan in the event of an attack, and if there is nothing the USSR would have liked better in the 80s than a war between the US and China. And, since the US knew that, and since Taiwan was essentially irrelevant to US interests, the US was not going to go to war with China over Taiwan. Especially if China had already used nukes.
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