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If Xi surrounds himself only with yes men, chances of successful invasion go down dramatically. Putin did the same - and it took three years of war for Russia to get their shit semi together.
We don't want to avoid successful invasion, we want to avoid "invasion that's enough to cause serious problems" which is a much lower bar. And I can see how out-of-touch rulers might have a higher chance at that even if they have a lower chance at successful invasions.
There is no invasion that will cause problems. I don't know why everybody has drunk the Kool aid that somehow lack of Taiwan semiconductors is a death blow. Even if we get a couple of nodes back we will be at what - 2016 production nodes. The horror.
If I had to guess, it's because "let the Taiwanese have the best superconductors" was a deliberate maneuver by the US to contain the CCP, and this narrative is part of that maneuver and will be used to get buy-in for actions taken to prevent China retaking Taiwan.
If things so really out of hand we could be looking at the destruction of vast parts of the world industrial system, not just in Taiwan, but also in China, plus the global disruption of sea trade. They're called World Wars for a reason!
Only if USA goes to war over Taiwan, for which the case is weak. Look - the whole of indochina with india to boot didn't cost the US blood spilled in Vietnam. And 60 k casualties is optimistic in a war near the shores of China.
If the United States doesn't, it likely kicks off a regional nuclear arms race. The US is relatively keen to avoid this for numerous reasons. I am not predicting that the US will go to war, but it has reasons to do so.
Setting aside for a moment the fact that the US could plausibly fight such a war a surprisingly long way from Chinese shores, the weird thing about sea wars is that they can be very low casualty compared to land wars. The Chinese could sink every destroyer in the US arsenal with 100% casualties and they'd only kill about 24k Americans. Sinking ten aircraft carriers instead would get them to about 33k; they might achieve similar numbers by killing every single servicemember on Guam during a conflict. If we look at a case where the US takes severe, possibly war-losing losses (say 50% of crew are killed aboard 2 carriers, 8 destroyers, 6 submarines, plus four-digit losses on the ground and 300 aircraft in the air) the final tally could still end up with fewer than 10,000 American deaths. I'm not making a predictive argument here, and I could certainly see the numbers going much higher, just pointing out how very low the personnel density is in an air-sea war compared to ground conflict. (If you look at World War Two as a comparison, on a quick Google it looks like around 60K Naval personnel were killed, about 20% of the losses in the Army/Army Air Force.)
Now, losing even a single carrier with all hands would be extremely high casualty relative to the War on Terror but I would not be surprised at all if the US could fight and win a war against China and take fewer casualties than in Vietnam.
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