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Comment by marianatom | Hacker News Reader

As a parent and someone who have acquaintances in China, I am encouraging many of my Chinese friends to get their kids out of the country right now, and not wait for Xi Jing Ping to declare himself emperor in October and preparing for war against Taiwan in the next 5 years. So their kids aren't ship fodders when China mobilize their citizens to get on ships that will be sank quickly and swiftly by US, Japanese and NATO navies.

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.

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Here is a timeline of the US pundit factoid that China plans to invade Taiwan by 2027 https://nitter.it/MikeBlack114/status/1571401031539367939#m The Chinese government hates free Taiwan and may invade but its a good idea to be suspicious of US government claims about the intentions of their enemy of the week.

> The Chinese government hates free Taiwan and may invade but its a good idea to be suspicious of US government claims about the intentions of their enemy of the week.

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 ?

International politics are not about good guys and bad guys. The US government hates the Iranian and Cuban governments, not because they are worse than US allies like Saudi Arabia, but because they once humiliated the USA. Until 24 February 2022 Germany got along well with Russia, not because they had the same type of government, but because each had something the other needed.

Assuming "why does the Chinese government hate a free Taiwan?" is a real question, because Taiwan is where the survivors of the Chinese Nationalist government went after they lost the civil war with the Communists (and Communists and Nationalists kept kidnapping and murdering each other after that date), and because Chinese Communist Party ideology emphasizes unifying all Chinese.

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.

> Chinese Communist Party ideology emphasizes unifying all Chinese.

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.

Pretty sure that the CCP policy that there is one China including Taiwan goes back to the 1950s. Its ugly and complicated history but Taiwanese people today can look at what is happening to the Uighurs and see very good reasons not to be conquered by China.

I'm talking about CCP in 1936, when they were still guerrilla.

Fair enough! The history between the KMT and the CCP in the 1940s and 1950s was really ugly and complicated, but it has lead to this situation where Beijing may try to conquer Taipei and hundreds of millions of people may suffer.

Taiwan is the Republic of China government that flee the mainland after they lost to the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war, so of course the CCP want to eradicate them once and for all.

> Wait, why does the Chinese government hate a free Taiwan ?

The answer to that is the most important subject barely taught at schools: history.

Well: history, and humans being.

So I guess 2027 is the ETA for when the new US chip fabs come online...

This is the analysis of someone who thinks "NATO navies" are going to fight the PRC.

Yeah, the only NATO navy worth talking about is the USN, with the Royal Navy and the Marine Nationale following distantly behind.

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)

Agreed on the US Navy, the French and Italians are right up there with the UK so. The former has a full nuclear triad, a nuclear carrier, nuclear subs. The latter has two active aircraft carriers.

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 did mention the French - they're the "Marine Nationale" in question!

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!)

The region around Taiwan has the benefit of mutiple, unsinkable, carriers, namely Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Not sure how far Italy deployed its carriers, that being said the above mentioned countries offers quite a few sophisticated naval bases as well. At the very least Harriers are still good enough for escort duty, if shit hits the fan someone needs to keep shipping lines open. A carrier is great for that, Harriers are great for that.

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.

In the event of a China v. NATO war, I imagine most non-US navies would be involved in preventing merchant ships from trading between China and the rest of the world, and in preventing China from similarly interdicting NATO use of the seas.

China will be hindered by not having any real allies, other than short term allies of convenience (Iran, Eritrea, for example).

True in detail, but were they wrong in essence? Does not most of the planet non-trivially value TSMC? I don't mean most people, but most decision-makers. Perhaps I project.

The idea that the world is going to come together to defend Taiwan to protect the semiconductor supply chain is completely impractical.

Unstoppable hypersonic missiles could destroy the semiconductor production infrastructure in minutes.

> Xi Jing Ping to declare himself emperor in October

what does this mean?

Get yet another presidential term

Given China's demographics, conscription seems entirely unnecessary for any of imperial ambitions.

> Given China's demographics, conscription seems entirely unnecessary for any of imperial ambitions.

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. It will have no problem recruiting enough volunteers, just like the US had no problem recruiting enough volunteers post-Vietnam.

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.

>>> Given China's demographics, conscription seems entirely unnecessary for any of imperial ambitions.

>> 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.

Okay. Let me put it in other words.

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.

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