Comment by hdivider
6 hours ago
I agree there is a lot of chaos over there, and numerous challenges. But I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union. It's going to be a long-term space race.
6 hours ago
I agree there is a lot of chaos over there, and numerous challenges. But I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union. It's going to be a long-term space race.
> I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union
I don’t either. But the Soviet Union’s space programme lost its steam in the 1970s. (Venus was its last ambitious achievement.)
If China gets bogged down in Taiwan because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him, that’s going to cost them the space race. (Same as if America decides to replicate the Sino-Soviet split with Europe over Greenland. We can’t afford a competitive space programme at that point.)
If China gets bogged down in Taiwan
The odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil. They could face an insurgency, but there isn't a whole lot of rural Taiwan for insurgents to vanish into and occupying cities is a lot easier absent language and cultural barriers. The could be isolated politically and economically, but realistically China's territorial claim on Taiwan is on far firmer legal and historical ground than many other territorial disputes (eg their control over Tibet).
I don't see the US involving itself directly. What are they going to do, counter-blockade? Start a naval shooting war with a full-on nuclear power on the other side of the world? I don't see Japan backing that either, despite their natural anxiety over the vulnerability of the Ryukyu islands. Support for US bases in Okinawa is ambivalent at best, and while Japan is surely not thrilled about Chinese regional hegemony it's also a reality they've dealt with for thousands of years.
> odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil
The odds of them winding up in a Russia-Ukraine are not nil. (Combined-arms war is hard even without ideological purges.)
America isn’t only outside power investing not only in helping Taiwan fight, but also making any victory pyrrhic. And following that, we’ll see Indian and Japanese containment go into overdrive. (To say nothing of the Philippines or Vietnam.)
I think Xi probably takes Taiwan. But that trades off China’s century of prosperity on economic and diplomatic fronts. That’s the trap the West has been laying, and Xi’s ego and internal constraints almost force him into it.
(Again, if China had showed its pre-Xi patience in the 2010s, we might have seen Taiwan voting to unify right now. Instead he rushed things for personal glory and enrichment.)
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> The odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil.
Exactly. Everyone keeps acting like it's 50 years ago. China has the world's largest navy and the largest navy almost always wins. They also have a home court advantage. Anyone trying to militarily protect Taiwan would either get the pants beat off of them or suffer starting a world war.
> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan...
Look at the geography. Taiwan is a long, narrow island. All the important parts are in a narrow plain on the west side, facing China. There's only about 20km of depth from the sea.
The war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that.
> There's only about 20km of depth from the sea
Don’t underestimate the stopping power of water. Taiwan will be China’s first combined-arms assault with a critical amphibious component.
> war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that
Wide-open plains are traditionally easier for large armies to conquer than mountains.
Although I agree the space program lost steam, I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements.
> I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements
Mir yes. Buran was an ambitious project but not achievement.
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> because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him
Are they being fired for disagreeing with him, or for misconduct.
I mean its hard to tell the difference from a western country, but "Zhang was put under investigation for allegedly forming political cliques, promoting Li Shangfu as defense minister in exchange for large bribes, and leaking core technical data on China's nuclear weapons to the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Youxia
Seems fairly reasonable. Like the US Military would act in the exact same way, if those circumstances are correct.
There's a question as to whether China's surplus capability is enough to overflow the deprivation that a space program might suffer in a chaos Taiwan scenario.
Their resources and capabilities are obviously substantial and sustained (not going anywhere). The USSR had only a few patches of sustained serious economic output, the rest of the time was rolling from one disaster to another, one deprivation after another.
It seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan, and go to the Moon during the Vietnam War (plus cultural chaos).
That said, China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining. China will ultimately regret not moving on the island sooner when they see how easy it's going to be to take it and how weak the US response will be (the US can't sustain a stand-off with China in that region for more than a few weeks before folding, unless it's willing to go to full war mode economically (which it's not)).
> seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan
We probably lost basing on the Moon because Bush went into Iraq.
China getting bogged down in Taiwan means more political repression, more restiveness in Xinjiang and—if New Delhi isn’t totally stupid—needing to prop up Pakistan and its strategic fronts in the Himalayas. It also almost certainly means demand destruction in Europe, the EU and ASEAN.
> China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining
The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.
China invading Taiwan demilitarized Japan and India. It fundamentally changes its doorstep in ways that incur costs. To the Soviets, Afghanistan. To America, Iraq and possibly Greenland. To China, Taiwan.
(And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.)
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