Bingo, PRC is not going to start amphib ops until TW has minimal weapons that can repel invasion left. They're not stupidly charging into a Normandy because they have magnitude more radars, missiles, drones etc, enough to make sure TW won't have much of theirs for long. TW is an island 16x smaller than UKR, much larger gap in MiC production vs PRC than UKR vs RU, and unabled to be resupplied via porous land borded by friendlies. TW also thoroughly covered by PRC ISR, including SAR to look through foliage, nearly every inch of which can be hit within 7 minutes with PRC rocketry. Less once PRC establishes persistent drone presence. It's why all the recent analysis depends on TW buying enough time for US+co to enter picture.
The flip side of a contested amphib operation is an uncontested one, which is potentially siginifantly easier than land invasion because there's no where for defenders to hide / ambush. Crossing a shallow strait where subs can't hide is probably easier than US plowing through Iraqi desert where defenders can at least pretend to put up defense by entrenching tanks / digging trenches. It's basically untested sailing if PRC destroys TW platforms that can hit back and lock down with air supremacy.
Also folks should look up TW river map, TW island is broken up into a series of bastions cut up by rivers where connections / bridges can be severed and sections attacked piece meal. If PRC's smart, they'll destroy most of TW weapon platforms that can reach out into water, bombard a few km of map squares of landing site to dust, have drones shoot everything that moves 5km out to carve a landing zone that can't be contested by large or small fires. If PRC smarter, they'd just blockade TW until world realize the only country with enough sealift to supply an island of 24m with food and water is PRC.
As for taking urban centres, look at how Israel is doing in Gaza with 20x population density than TW, theoretically urban combat is suppose to be slaughter vs attacker but if you indiscrimantly bomb and starve the population until they can't put up organized high end fight, then it becomes a managable problem. And again if PRC smart and they have to land boots on ground, they'd likely just siege from outside urban centres and small fires range, and wait for factional struggle and find collaborators willing to do boots on ground enforcement in return for controlling food + water.
I think China won't attack soon. It seems they play a long time game vs Taiwan, where they try to bring Taiwan, closer, weeken it's ties to its allies and slowly making Taiwan to become more dependent on China.
China is convinced they will get Taiwan back and whether that happens in 20,50 or 100 years, that is good enough.
At least until China builds a self sufficient semiconductor industry, I don't think they are going to attack Taiwan.
I don't think they want to go kinetic first either, but I think natural byproduct of PRC military modernizing, and modernizing specifically with taking TW _AND_ fighting US+co in mind, is if things pop off for whatever reason, the escalation will snowball. And it will snowball somewhere very destructive because all parties in this game are ramping up capabilities to deter, but when deterrence fails, there's lots of hardware that's not going to do deterring but shooting.
As for PRC waiting, I think they can wait, even past 2049, PRC centennial, but they're not going to wait for ever. TW indentity growing, a few more generations and culture completely disentangle (aging pro-ish PRC, KMT cohorts not going to be around forever). At some point, PRC isn't going to see TWneses as "fellow Chinese" occupying TW, a Chinese province. But a foreign culture occupying Chinese land, and that's going to generate all manners of opennings for conflict.
On the one hand you have a point, and they're drifting apart culturally - but at the same time Taiwan is not keeping up economically or culturally at all.
If the rate of economic progress stays close to constant, in a decade it's going to be hard to look at the evil communists across the straight who are much better off living standards wise. Taipei is a bit drab and ugly that hasn't seen any development in the last decade. It looks worse than second tier cities in China. Just my surface level impression is that you fly across the straight and people are dressed nicer and look better off on the subway there.
On the cultural front they're also not doing hot.. the domestic culture is anemic. They don't make movies like they did in the 90s. Nobody cares about Taiwan's cultural output (other than bubble tea). The art scene is honestly.. pathetic here. In large part b/c they can't engage with anything historic other than recent history of the White terror. There is an eww factor with regards to engaging with Chinese history - its seen as the culture of the "other" and so you see it in every day life.. no tea ceremony, no hanfu, no interest in history. There is also no real "Taiwanese culture" that would be alien to a Chinese person (I can only think of Pili?). There is some stuff built on top of Fujianese culture.. but it's got no legs so far.
The elephant in the room is that Taiwanese are also starting to consume more and more Chinese media - which was kinda garbage quality for a long time but has vastly improved in the last 5 years. I think this will take off. You can already see it on Tiktok and stuff.. people use a lot more mainland terms and expressions.
If the Chinese were smart they'd build 10-20 ferries and offer people free trips to Xiamen/Shanghai. Most Taiwanese never travel to China and have little sense for the cultural similarities
If the Chinese manage to ramp up chip production then Taiwanese is really screwed. TSMC is some insane percentage of the GDP. The other insane fraction is of course businesses that work in China like Foxconn.. China already has this place by the balls unfortunately
> If the rate of economic progress stays close to constant, [...]
Not going to happen. So far in all economies, catchup growth has inevitably slowed down as they moved to the global technological frontier.
Taiwan was famously one of the Asian tigers. As you already noticed, her growth has slowed down a lot. PR China has seen enormous growth, but has also slowed down in the last ten years or so, and looks to slow down further.
At the moment, PR China as a whole is a lot poorer per capita than Taiwan. Though you can argue that for our purposes here, Taiwanese people would compare themselves to the coastal provinces of PR China.
(Of course, they would also look at Hong Kong as the obvious comparison for a (semi-) independent entity joining PR China. And just going by raw growth, officially joining China doesn't seem to have accelerated HK growth at all.)
My point is that just from .. on the ground "feel" and quality of life .. Hong Kong, Taipei and large Chinese cities are all at rather similar levels (each having their own pluses and minuses). And I don't see them growing at the same rate from here on out.
People keep predicting the slowing of growth in China, but it's not materialized (at least anywhere close to the degree the experts expected). Just over the period of the pandemic I saw personally a huge amount of development and growth in China, while virtually nothing in Taiwan.
I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls. There are serious structural problems here in Taiwan that have made it stall (bureaucratic, extreme protectionist trade policy with huge tariffs on imports, little entrepreneurial spirit, anemic art scene, weak work ethic, an extremely non-confrontational culture, etc.).
Similar to Hong Kong, a key economic driver was their function as a bridge between the West and China - but this has become mostly redundant now.
All good things must come to an end. China will stall eventually too, for instance they're getting incredibly bureaucratic now, but they still have some runway.
I'm living in Singapore, which has the interesting distinction of being (mostly) culturally Chinese, but politically independent. Singapore is one of the richest countries on earth (in terms of GDP per capita), and we are working our way up the list of richest cities, too.
> I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls.
Growth slows down a lot as you hit the global productivity frontier. Taiwan isn't quite there, yet, but it's a lot closer that mainland China.
I'm not sure what word you want to be using. Roughly and pragmatically speaking, you can catch up pretty quickly (with the right policies), but your per capita (non-oil) income can't really go (much) beyond the US.
Once you reach American levels of prosperity, you will also find yourself reduced to roughly American levels of growth.
That's not zero growth, just very slow growth compared to the preceding years of breakneck catchup growth.
Have a look at eg Japan between WW2 and ~1990, and then from ~1990 to now. Naive extrapolation in the 1980s gave us some lovely cyberpunk, but reality looked different.
You are right that Taiwan at about 33k USD per capita is still quite a while away from the US's roughly 76k USD per capita. And I suspect with the right policies, they could catch up more. Just look to Singapore for what's possible. But even our almost mythical city state has slowed down a lot compared to the halcyon days.
> People keep predicting the slowing of growth in China, but it's not materialized [...]
Just going by official PRC figures, growth has slowed a lot. And that's still compatible with your observation that observed PRC growth was higher than in Taiwan.
> I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls. There are serious structural problems here in Taiwan that have made it stall (bureaucratic, extreme protectionist trade policy with huge tariffs on imports, little entrepreneurial spirit, anemic art scene, weak work ethic, an extremely non-confrontational culture, etc.).
Yes, I am glad that Singapore has so far stayed clear of most of these issues. But I'm afraid that eventually, democracy will do us in. Where by 'democracy' I mean giving in to what voters say they want. Protectionism in various disguises is popular with ordinary folks the world over. And so are various measures to weaken work ethics, or to limit migration ('those foreigners are taking our jobs' is a cliched complaint for a reason).
Our Gahmen is far from perfect, but I feel like the strongest policy disagreements I have with them is where against their better judgement they gave in to popular demands.
I just hope that the decline in governance will be gradual enough, that it won't matter for me.
(For comparison, cities like New York or London had pretty poor governance for probably close to a century now (depending on how you look at it) and they are still going strong, even if not as strong as they could have gone.)
I think it's very difficult to compare across countries and using official statistics. Both Tiapei and a place like Chongqing are not at the level of development as Singapore. That's very true. But there are many distorting factors.
For instance on paper the US is very wealthy, but I think this is mostly due to the strength of the currency. An "average" electrical engineer in Taiwan can expect to earn 30K USD a year. That's how much someone without a highschool diploma can make in the USA working in fastfood. I doubt this really functions are a metric of the engineer's productivity. (the US is also not as some natural limit by any stretch of the imagination - it's got absolutely colossal societal issues)
Looking from the outside Singapore seems to have a lot of other challenges. Just due to being a small city state for starters - not to mention the social/cultural factors. I'm not really sure it represents some kind of natural limit. The big Chinese cities are also pooling talent from the vast provinces. While in a city state you're mostly stuck with the talent that's born there
There is also this curious factor that life in Chinese cities is in a sense subsidized by the rural poor. So the middle class quality of life is sustained b/c there are people that are willing to work really hard for very little money. Taking a taxi in Shanghai is infinitely cheaper than taking one in Singapore - b/c there is some guy/girl from the countryside willing to do it for cheap (you have a limited version of that with the Malay and Malaysian Chinese underclass in Singapore). At some point growth will slow as the rural poor become wealthier and life in the cities becomes a bit more expensive
I'm not too familiar with life in Singapore - I've only visited a few times - but it seems to have similar problems to Taiwan with a anemic cultural sphere (growing up people all try to be engineers) and lack of innovation. The only company I know from Singapore is Shoppee - which is basically a low-rent Taobao reseller (without all the innovations of Taobao). Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
I didn't really work intensively professionally in China, but I got the sense there is a lot of experimentation, people just trying stuff out, people starting businesses - at the same time there was a deep appreciation and interest in cultural "things" which was also subsidized extensively by the state. I do wonder how far it can go in a censored environment, but it seems to be flourishing for the moment. I'm sure things will slow down - but I don't feel it's going to slam the breaks and stay at Taiwanese levels of development
And yeah you're right, if it's not the poor getting wealthier then populist measures, regulations and bureaucracy does everyone in eventually :)
I thought Singapore was more like Hong Kong: the real money in a in finance and business, engineering (including programmers) are considered less important and so make a lot less money (they can make more by working in mainland china).
Mainland China definitely seems to value engineers than other Asian countries. They pay better even than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in many technical fields, which is why I had so many work mates from those countries when I was working at Microsoft in Beijing.
I've worked in both finance and tech in Singapore, and you can make good money in either field. If you look at stats, they also reflect that Singapore's economy is a lot more diversified than Hong Kong's.
Yeah, could be. I might be in a bit of a bubble. The Universities in Singapore seem to be more known for engineering than their business schools - but that could very well just be my ignorance
> (the US is also not as some natural limit by any stretch of the imagination - it's got absolutely colossal societal issues)
Yes, but empirically the US sits close to the global technological frontier.
> The big Chinese cities are also pooling talent from the vast provinces. While in a city state you're mostly stuck with the talent that's born there
Why would that be? People can move to Singapore, just as much as they can move to any other city. The only thing keeping them out are immigration rules that Singapore herself sets. In fact, Singapore has lots and lots of immigrants. I am one of them.
> For instance on paper the US is very wealthy, but I think this is mostly due to the strength of the currency. An "average" electrical engineer in Taiwan can expect to earn 30K USD a year. That's how much someone without a highschool diploma can make in the USA working in fastfood.
Well, and the currency is strong because there's a lot of demand for it.
> (you have a limited version of that with the Malay and Malaysian Chinese underclass in Singapore).
Not really. If you want to point at an underclass here, looking at our foreign domestic workers (ie maids) and the migrant construction labourers would be much more apt. These days, if you have a Singaporean passport, you only really have yourself to blame.
(People with a Malaysian passport also still have it somewhere easier getting a visa to work in Singapore.)
> Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
I think Singaporeans like to complain, and they don't appreciate their own achievements. Did you know that Sound Blaster / Creative Labs is from Singapore?
The Chinese mainland is an enormous market. Market size is a big factor that helps with growth. That's (part of) how the UK industrialised in the first place, and it's also part of why the US got as rich as they are. (Nowadays the UK isn't exactly a big country, but at the time they represented one of the bigger unified markets. Eg across the channel France, even though it was politically united, was plagued by internal tariffs.)
Computer programmers from Taiwan go to the PRC to earn more money. Heck, programmers from Japan and ROK find they can get more money in China as well with the right specialty. It is just one small segment of their economy, but the money China is willing to spend on tech is no joke, and dwarfs its neighbors in terms of salaries.
Post HK crackdown protesters partying in and shopping in PRC. Lot's of buy China movement generating domestic brands across the spectrum happening. IMO yes, PRC cultural catchet will increase, most next TWers will look at sinicized next gen HKers and realize being "another" priveleged Chinese city not so bad. More new TW democracy dysfunction reveals itself, i.e. sunflower kids getting lesson in majority rule now, more jaded people will realize systems matter less than progress. The force against this is cohort voting math + entire LIO+Authoritarian propaganda layer with 100s of western NGOs on the ground. IMO pro-TW identity/independance bloc going to be too loud and too large past 2049.
> I think China won't attack soon. It seems they play a long time game vs Taiwan, where they try to bring Taiwan, closer, weeken it's ties to its allies and slowly making Taiwan to become more dependent on China.
That might be a sensible strategy. But: sabre rattling now is exactly the wrong way to go about weakening Taiwan's ties with her allies.
The flip side of a contested amphib operation is an uncontested one, which is potentially siginifantly easier than land invasion because there's no where for defenders to hide / ambush. Crossing a shallow strait where subs can't hide is probably easier than US plowing through Iraqi desert where defenders can at least pretend to put up defense by entrenching tanks / digging trenches. It's basically untested sailing if PRC destroys TW platforms that can hit back and lock down with air supremacy.
Also folks should look up TW river map, TW island is broken up into a series of bastions cut up by rivers where connections / bridges can be severed and sections attacked piece meal. If PRC's smart, they'll destroy most of TW weapon platforms that can reach out into water, bombard a few km of map squares of landing site to dust, have drones shoot everything that moves 5km out to carve a landing zone that can't be contested by large or small fires. If PRC smarter, they'd just blockade TW until world realize the only country with enough sealift to supply an island of 24m with food and water is PRC.
As for taking urban centres, look at how Israel is doing in Gaza with 20x population density than TW, theoretically urban combat is suppose to be slaughter vs attacker but if you indiscrimantly bomb and starve the population until they can't put up organized high end fight, then it becomes a managable problem. And again if PRC smart and they have to land boots on ground, they'd likely just siege from outside urban centres and small fires range, and wait for factional struggle and find collaborators willing to do boots on ground enforcement in return for controlling food + water.