>It would be smarter to let HK persist to convince Taiwan there is no threat to re-unification so that they move towards annexation willingly.

It's a display of strength, in my opinion. "Struggle all you want, but in the end we will have our way with you." I'm not a geopolitical expert or anything but I fully expect China to take Taiwan by force while the West is busy with Russia. I'm fairly certain that we couldn't effectively sanction both China _and_ Russia

If it did happen, it'd probably be the worst war we've seen, full stop.

The US is still giving out Purple Hearts medals meant for the land invasion of Japan, which was expected to be horrific in terms of casualties due to the terrain. In this context, the US actually investigated and totally gave up on the idea of a land invasion of Taiwan, because the geography is so much worse; there are very few flat beaches from which to do an amphibious D-day style landing, and all of them are a few km away from mountains from which to rain down artillery.

I can't imagine it going any better than Russia's invasion. Taiwan is all mountains, there's a sea in between with 13 beaches where they can land and China's military has no experience whatsoever. It would literally be shooting fish in a barrel for the Taiwanese army.

Is strategy even involved? The CCP often displays an impressive ability of actually following through with strategy, but I'd be surprised if this capability didn't have any glaring blind spots. Chances are these changes are nothing more than a series of purely tactical decisions, either without any strategical thought or perhaps even despite considerations not unlike yours. Might have been frog in boiling water for the perpetrators as much as for the victims.

Of course there is a strategy, and not only from the CCP side. It's a power struggle to retain vs. subvert power between the Chinese state and the Western sphere of influence in East Asia. The battle lines have shifted from one outlying area of containment to another, from Korea (war, 1950-1953), Taiwan (war, 1950's), Vietnam (war, 1960's), Tibet (rebellion, 1959-1973), a detente after Nixon, back to color revolution in the late 80's (Tiananmen), Tibet again (rebellion, late 1980's), and Xinjiang (terrorism, 1990's to 2000's), Taiwan (1996), Tibet again (2008), Hong Kong (color revolution, 2003 to 2020), back to Xinjiang again (2018 to now), and in a major way, Taiwan (2016 to now).

It's funny people think these are all random occurrences or all the doing of the CCP. During the detente, even the Dalai Lama suddenly went to the "Middle Way" and shut up for 15 years.

> HK citizens are spoiled drama queens

HK is one of my favourite cities but one thing that I do not like about HK is how its citizens of Chinese descent (not all of course) think that they are superior to people in the Mainland. They try to make the differentiation by identifying themselves as Hongkongers (香港人) and not Chinese.

When they are outside of Hong Kong and have to fill in their ethnicity on application forms etc, no country has 'Hongkonger' as an ethnicity or even nationality.

My friends of Chinese descent born in the UK with parents from HK identify their ethnicity as Chinese. I really don't understand the minds of these Hongkongers sometimes..

Taiwan, the Republic of China, will never peacefully 'surrender' to the communists. So there is no prospect of peaceful reunification as long as the CCP holds power on the mainland.

The CCP/PRC knows that very well so there is no point for them to allow HK to persist, especially considering that this could give ideas on the mainland ("if HK can have this, why can't we?")

(Also, no-one ever talks about Macao, but it's the same as HK)