Please read the rest of the article. It discusses how China could force TSMC to stop producing chips. It even covers the US foundry, and why it won't make a difference.
But all of realistic options listed entail the fatal political defeat of Taiwan, mostly through military action. Existential political threats usually end up as military conflicts, one way or another.
The only option that doesn't involve military action is the disinformation campaign, but that's pretty far fetched.
Like, a full on boycott.
Maybe Taiwan can sell their 150B in products to Americans?
I think China's greatest threat comes from within. And the brinkmanship is at supply-side structural reform VS unemployment.
The risk has never been this high, given
1. belt and road initiative is already half-busted
2. drastic drop of foreign demand due to pandemic
3. cry for decoupling from all wealthy nations
And see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q8oQGBcFdo
My point is: the Chinese government has been trying to tell people that they don't need to work in the city. They could work in a rural farm and lead a simple life, albeit earning close to nothing.
They’re in low value jobs that keeps themselves busy, but doesn’t bring in much profit for China, except for Foxconn and Apple.
Apple benefits from cheap Chinese labor, while selling their iWares at inflated prices.
What China can do instead, is to retarget these factory workers to work in software development, or AI grunt work.
Currently, AI requires a lot of manual human data labeling, in order to identify objects.
China can utilize this already cheap and organized factory labor, to build up an object inference database. That way, the AI systems of today, can cross reference against this inference database, to identify the object.
This inference database literally becomes, the new oil of the AI age.
And through a lot of sweat equity, China can possibly dominate this key area for the AI future.
Maybe this is why 5G is so important? The lower latency of 5G would usher in the AI age.
The western world is so focused on Foxconn, and its “supposed benefits” to China. But the benefits are meager. The biggest beneficiary is Apple itself.
China should let Foxconn and other low value industries go, in order to free themselves to work on higher value pursuits.
The other side of the coin is what will happen to Apple and the American economic system?
They will have to pick up and relocate to other third world countries, for their cheap labor. Vietnam, India, Mexico? Sure. But a lot of other mid level goods come from China.
If the supply chain is stopped, then everyone is impacted. The whole thing stops.
Apple’s stock price will crater. Supposedly. But the Fed is so busy juicing the market, and Apple can just repurchase their shares, that they can financially engineer themselves out of this stock meltdown scenario.
- direct military invasion
- disinformation campaign
- trade war with Taiwan
- nationalization of old fabs in China
- missile strikes on TSMC facilities in Taiwan
Wouldn't that be all out war? Then why stopping half way? If the goal is denial/disruption of chip production.
'Missiles'? Really? Anyone can theoretically use 'missiles' to knock out the production capacity of some competitor's fabs.
It would be fatal to China's ambitions in everything because the world's reaction would be quite strong.
China has a lot of people upset around the world, but a lot of voices are muted because of perceived repercussions, but something 'over the top' would encourage all of those voices to come out at once.
Even Russia would have to 'think again' about their relationship.
But didn't they do so through proxies, which gives them at least a little deniability?
Yeah but PRC would totally do it. They already gave the go-ahead to their allies to attack U.S. partners with missiles, a first-party strike is really not hard to imagine.
Feel free to disagree. I expect a storm of downvotes. Oh well.
And it's pretty questionable whether the USA could even do much to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They could perhaps harass it a little, at great distance to avoid the otherwise inevitable loss of their carriers, but the success or failure of any invasion would largely depend on Taiwan's military and political/national will.
In addition to its estimated 10-15 road-mobile DF-31 ICBMs, China has 6 active submarines with 12 missiles each. Even assuming a 50% reliability rate that's 30 cities. The USA would be utterly devastated.
Russia might then decide to simply finish the job.
Your ideas are just so ridiculous I don't need to argue further.
As to the subs the latest China sub is the type 094 which cannot reach the continental US with their current load of JL-2 (7200km) in their current patrol zone. Also they are pretty noise and easily tracked. JL-3 (9000KM) are not in wide service.
The US has a further 10600 or so warheads on ICBM. China’s total count is around 400.
The logical game theory response is for the US to go full nuclear day 0. That is what every general and every theorist in the pentagon will advise the president. I am not saying it’s a good idea, but the logic is sound if you except the fact that the US would be unwilling to allow the dollars position to be challenged.
The leadership of China is pretty damn smart and they know this. I applauded them in playing the long game, something which the last few American governments have forgotten how to do. Our inability to think long term will bring us down, not China.
But all of this is ridiculous. Yes of course the USA has more warheads. They could indeed cause catastrophic destruction in China. No-one said they couldn't. The point is that China can and would counter-strike, with devastating results. This is the whole point of nuclear deterrence. No-one believes they couldn't, except apparently you with your completely unrealistic fantasies about the USA's godlike superiority. The USA as you know it would be gone.
And you somehow believe the USA would trigger this frigging holocaust to protect its image, or the US Dollar? What Dollar? The Fed's a smoking crater. Just delusional.
Here is a very detailed story on warhead guidance and accuracy and how harden targets are destroyed. It is quite interesting.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
Every fixed ICBM location in the world is known to all the major powers. You can find a pretty good list on fas.org. It will including things like year built, what was the state of the art at that time, yield needed to destroy, etc. Also there are tons of research papers on first strike imbalance and launch reaction time done by well respected scientist and think tanks available on the internet. Reaction time is more important because most silos today cannot survive an accurate strike so you have to launch before the misses hit. If they could then why build mobile launchers？
It’s not tracking a truck, it is tracking a very large thing that is easy to follow that has to exit a know location for servicing over its life time. The NRO has 60+ years of experience tracking way more items then the 30 DF31/31A mobile launchers that China has. The USSR had 1000s for them to practice on.
This has zero to do with god like powers or some unreasonably belief in US superiority and everything to do with math and technology. The logic is very simple, a protracted conventional war with China makes no sense as it will end up as a nuclear war, so if a war starts a massive first strike day 0 is the most logical path. And yes, I do believe the US would do so to protect its place in the power structure of the world and I am a rational person who would love to see all nuclear weapons eliminated along with the need of any or us to maintain large militaries.
The planners do not think in emotion. They do the math and odds and there is a calculation that says an overwhelming first strike has acceptable risk and Guam, et.al. that the smaller weapons could hit are an okay trade off for not allowing a hit on the continental US along with complete destruction of Chinese forces. There are 1000s of people in the US Defense Department who’s only job is to calculate all of the possible scenarios, including this one and wrap it all up in a nice summary of casualties (explosion + long term fallout given winds, etc.) and probabilities of success and they do so without the emotional reaction that you have. It’s quite scary if you really think about it.
China may hate Japan historically for the atrocities in WW2, but they also fear them for the same reasons.
Go on then, boycott us! I bet you can't, we make EVERYTHING.
China is Nestlé on steroids. What is anyone really going to do to China? What country can continue to function without Chinese manufacturing?
If the Chinese political situation broke down to the point that they were bombing fabs in Taiwan, there will be plenty of ways to destabilize their efforts.