Let's not even talk about Taiwan, which will be the first target, and its plants will all produce chips for Chinese products.

Those plants will 100% be destroyed/disabled in the event of an invasion.

Those plants depend on a lot of imports for spare parts and raw materials, even if China took them over tomorrow somehow intact with with the people to operate them, they would be out of commission in a month or so.

They say that but it doesn't really make sense to actually do it.

Even if that is possible (unlikely), it will be a big blow to American power because Taiwan produces the best of semiconductor technology.

Can we even talk about a world war like this in the nuclear era? Wouldn't we all just annihilate each other with nuclear weapons if we had a full fledged war?

The more time Russia spends in Ukraine, the more evidence we get that no, we won't just annihilate each other. We will probably do something more complex.

>manufacturing plants the west built in places like Thailand and Vietnam

What are these?

Apple https://asiamattersforamerica.org/articles/apple-exploring-m...

Did Apple build these factories?

Invading Thailand and Vietnam would likely lead to a military alliance of them US, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and possibly South Korea. If they just want Taiwan at least for now it seems like a bad idea to get all the other countries to enter the war