Wait, why does the Chinese government hate a free Taiwan ? US gov was pretty on point with the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Shouldn’t we be suspicious about a government that “hates” a free neighbor ?
The answer to that is the most important subject barely taught at schools: history.
Well: history, and humans being.
See also the CCP's crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was another place where Chinese people lived with independent courts, a free press, and multiple parties and the CCP was not satisfied.
Interestingly, CCP wanted to help Taiwan, Mongolia, Korea and many other provinces to independent. It is KMT (nationalist government) who advocate unifying all Chinese. I guess the nationalist government won the propaganda war, now CCP go KMT's way.
The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force is much more impressive than the Brits and the French though. (And Japan has major strategic reasons to keep the Chinese on the far side of the Taiwan Strait, most relevant being that that's the easiest place to stop an island hopping campaign towards the home islands)
Sure, might be challenging to project that power to the straight of Taiwan, but by no means impossible as part of a coalition force. And especially the French have some vested interesst in the Pacific with their overseas territories.
I'm not sure the Italian carriers are relevant for operations in Southeast Asia. Maybe once they get F35Bs, but their Harriers would not fare well against much of anything, and that's assuming they have the ability to operate at such a distance from the Mediterranean in the first place. (Incidentally, what most of the world calls a carrier is not what the USN calls a carrier. STOVL carriers are not really in the same class as CATOBAR carriers!)
True so that US carriers, and vessels like the De Gaulle and the British carrier (Elizabeth-class if memory serves well) are different beast than the Italian ones. And the US has quite a few of those.
China will be hindered by not having any real allies, other than short term allies of convenience (Iran, Eritrea, for example).
Unstoppable hypersonic missiles could destroy the semiconductor production infrastructure in minutes.
what does this mean?
What do you mean? Sure it has a large population, but it's also a nation of only children.
And because any conflict its likely to fight will not be one across a two-thousand kilometer front that physically requires millions of people sitting in trenches. It's not 1943 or 1917 anymore.
>> What do you mean? Sure it has a large population, but it's also a nation of only children.
> For the same reason that China did not need conscription when it fought the Korean war.
Your kind of ignoring the point. During the Korean War, China didn't have the one-child policy and families were big. The US never had such a policy.
There are more people between the ages of 15 and 35 in China than there are people alive in the United States.
There are more 20 year-olds in China than there are men in Taiwan.
You don't need conscription to fight a naval war when you have almost a billion and a half people. Your demographics support finding enough volunteers.
Also, the one-child policy put China's fertility rate at 1.70 children per woman. You know what the US fertility rate is?
1.70 children per woman.
Taiwan's fertility rate? 1.2 children per woman.
You've been doing this repeatedly, unfortunately, and it goes against the kind of forum we're trying to have here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That said, there's already a huge migration for many Chinese citizens, especially those from Shanghai, to Singapore and Malaysia this year, since now it's super hard to emigrate to US or Australia or Canada. The rich do see the writing on the wall. or rather, the many buses to the covid concentration camps.