All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
That's imperialism.
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.