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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There is a more simple explanation - if China wants a boat to travel from anywhere to Guangzhou, Tianjin or Shanghai then at the moment the boat has to pass close by an island that is a US ally. If China controlled Taiwan, that would no longer be true and they'd have easy access to the Pacific.

For the last 300? 400? years the dominant global superpower has been a naval power. You don't need to be a Leninist or a "true believer" to see China's future glory being helped by controlling Taiwan.

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> There is a more simple explanation - if China wants a boat to travel from anywhere to Guangzhou, Tianjin or Shanghai then at the moment the boat has to pass close by an island that is a US ally. If China controlled Taiwan, that would no longer be true and they'd have easy access to the Pacific.

No, it would still be true. Just beyond Taiwan on the north side are the furthest islands in the Japanese island chain, and if you instead head south, you see Philippine islands instead. Head through the South China Sea and you end up either having to run past Singapore through the Straits of Malacca (already a critical, congested chokepoint), or travel through the internal waters of Indonesia or the Philippines (admittedly, I'm not sure you could call Singapore, Malaysia, or Indonesia US allies, given the general ASEAN propensity for neutrality).

Singapore is aligned with the West, trains with/by Australia who are aligned with the US and NZ.

This is true, but they fell VERY quickly when the Japanese showed up. Maybe they'll do it again.

You do realize the Singapore of today is very different from the Singapore of the 40s (which was still a British colony)?

They may be neutral, but China doesn't care much. I've personally seen in cca 2014 in Philippine's Palawan islands (near El Nido, great diving place btw) big modern military ship plus few smaller that were there stationed semi-permanently. When I checked online back then there were already some provocations from Chinese side happening so this was the response.

China already has easy access outside of the territorial waters of its neighbours. Taiwan's territorial waters don't really prevent it from operating. Less so than Japan, Vietnam and Philipines.

The lack of access to the world's oceans isn't the only issue. It's the access without being close to submarine listening stations.

I don't even really understand what "glory" is supposed to mean here; I'm more a believer in the cold, hard reality of geopolitical survival : you can't be a global superpower when your own seafront is literally at the mercy of an hostile (and warlike) nation.

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