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Notes -
China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.
This is one of the most provocative moves China's made in living memory and a potential precursor to war. On the old site, I wrote:
It remains to be seen how committed to this move China is. As for now, it's comparatively limited, to last only a couple days and not covering the southern and eastern approaches to Taiwan. It's even possible that some ambitious regional authority is doing this on his own (see: possible explanations for the weather balloon). But it's absolutely an escalation, and it is as representative of China nibbling like a silkworm as anything.
The easy thing would be for Taiwan to offer vigorous protests and do nothing, which is China's expectation. Doing that simply encourages China to do this more and more, though; soon it becomes a regular occurrence, then just the reality on the ground.
Is this the time for China to make its move? Its vassalization of Russia continues. But other less-covered stories are in progress: it's peeling away Saudi Arabia from American influence and recently achieved a diplomatic coup in getting Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore relations.
On the other hand, it still seems too early to me. American forces can more likely than not win in a (costly) fight. China's hope is probably for Taiwan to acquiesce; if challenged, I think it would back down. But this is exactly the type of situation that could spiral out of control.
What is it about the 5 or 10 year timeline that swings the calculus in China’s favor? What are they gaining from the delay? I’m assuming any island-hopping airbases are more for SCS control and wouldn’t feature into an invasion.
Presumably, China's current odds of taking Taiwan are near zero. In five years the odds will either be the same (near zero) or higher. Waiting makes sense for that reason alone.
The question then becomes this: will China's odds increase? I say yes. For one, their economy is growing much faster than that of the U.S. Secondly, effective Chinese military spending (PPP adjusted) is probably at this point equal or greater than U.S. spending. The United States still has a large material advantage from decades of accumulation. But this gets reduced every day. In 5-10 years China will likely have missiles or other weapons systems capable of denying U.S. naval forces from the Taiwan Strait.
Of course, this all goes out the window with fast AI takeoff. But that's true of everything nowadays.
I’d be interested in seeing writeups on the military spending efficiency. We outspend them almost 3:1, or twice as much in %GDP. Maybe they really are getting that much more value; if so, I’d want to understand the mechanism.
The first adjustment we'd need to do is PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). This is an attempt to measure the actual production of an economy, not its market value. Things are cheaper in China. A meal costing $5 in the United States would cost $15 in the United States due to expensive labor and rent. China's PPP economy is already about 20% larger than the U.S. while its nominal economy is 28% smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
This adjustment alone reduces the advantage from 3/1 to 2/1.
To go beyond that, we'd need a sort of "military PPP". I think we can get partway there. The U.S. military is a giant jobs program. The Chinese army probably is too. In the U.S. an E-2 (Private First Class) with less than 2 years experience earns over 50k in pay, housing credits, and food credits. Medical care, pension, and other costs probably double this.
https://militarypay.defense.gov/Calculators/RMC-Calculator/
How much does the Chinese equivalent make? I would be surprised if it was even 20% as much. And right there, we can see that a huge source of the disparity just vanishes into air.
Another factor is that Chinese manufacturing and large projects are much more efficient. Hangzhou started building its metro system in 2012. Today its metro system has 254 stations making it roughly the same size as London and greater than Chicago and DC combined. I've seen numbers thrown around that the Chinese are able to build large infrastructure 10 times cheaper than the U.S. Certainly they are able to do it much much faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
So the U.S. spends 3 times as much as China?
Goods costs 60% more in the U.S. (PPP adjustment)
Military salaries are probably 400% higher or more in the U.S.
U.S. large projects could cost 1,000% as much.
It's likely that Chinese military spending already outstrips that of the United States in many ways that matter.
China has a huge corruption problem though (whereas the US has a smaller corruption problem). What China spends on paper is very different than what they are actually getting. They've spent multiple years (decades?) trying to get it under control (and largely failing).
There's a good chance a decent chunk of what China says it has either does not exist or is not up to the standards they think it is. Foreign penetration of Chinese military shipbuilding is also pretty good because you can slip it in with all the other corruption.
"The disgraced deputy head of the state-owned firm developing China’s first home-grown aircraft carrier may face the death penalty over his alleged involvement in passing its secrets to foreign intelligence agents."
They even had to arrest their own anti-corruption officer for...taking bribes.
"First to fall was Liu Changhong, the CSIC anti-corruption czar. Fired, expelled from the party, and arrested in September 2017, Liu was accused of accepting bribes and using the convenience of his position to “seek benefits for others in business operations as well as personnel selection and appointment.” "
Their research division was being investigated every two years and each report basically said, "Yup, still highly corrupt" no matter how many people they fired or imprisoned.
"CCDI inspectors again found little improvement when they returned for the third time in March 2019. Despite warnings, there were continued violations of Central Committee regulations on proper official conduct. Corruption was still ongoing and laws were regularly broken. "
And there is a reason for that:
If you haven't been in touch with Chinese bureaucracy directly (or Pakistani bureaucracy, my other area of experience) it is difficult to understate just how much graft and falsification goes on and how it is basically just part of the system. Fire someone and replace them and the chances are the replacements are just as corrupt. It's endemic.
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