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Comment by neovialogistics | Hacker News Reader

China faces a real dilemma in how to achieve it's goal of annexing Taiwan, killing the Taiwanese intellectuals, suppressing the natives and looting the industrial/IP assets:

An attack across the strait with a large buildup of troops (150,000+) and SEAD campaign will need months of logistical preparations which comes with the risk of giving the ROC enough warning to build a nuclear deterrent.

However, a rushed attack with less than three months of preparations is likely to be repulsed by the ROC military unless China resorts to a Grozny-style leveling campaign that would unfortunately make the whole endeavor unprofitable.

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> goal of annexing Taiwan, killing the Taiwanese intellectuals, suppressing the natives and looting the industrial/IP assets

That's not China goal, which should be pretty obvious to anyone who took five minutes to think and read a couple of article about China historic strategy regarding Taiwan: economic integration and sponsoring the Taiwanese business elites. To be fair, the idea of annexing with Taiwan seems to have a lot more to do with the internal politics of mainland China than actually Taiwan nowadays.

For all my own distate of the CCP, it's a bit sad that we have reached a point where having an intelligent discussion regarding foreign countries with an average American has become next to impossible.

I'm not specific to China. I figure that for any country X to profitably annex country Y, they have to both annex Y and suppress opposition (kill most of the pre-annexation establishment, control the natives and loot industrial output).

If any country X annexes any country Y without doing the other stuff, the annexation won't be profitable.

That doesn't make sense here. Mainland China and Taiwan economies are already extremely integrated and most of the richest Taiwanese are actually fairly close to the CCP. That's my grip with the coverage of the situation in the US. Most American don't understand the current situation very well and imagine that Taiwan is a lot more segregated from China that it actually is.

Plus, a significant minority of Taiwanese are actually favorable to China (around 10% of the population). China doesn't want to loot Taiwan. They want control of the island. I still agree with you that it probably wouldn't go well for part of the population as illustrated by the current situation in Hong Kong.

You can read this article from the New Yorker for an actually raisonable coverage of the situation (something which is sorely laking in the US media establishment): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/a-dangerous-ga...

You're arguing that annexing Taiwan and then refraining from redirecting industrial output/revenue towards the Chinese domestic market* will be a net profit for Beijing.

There's a big hole in that argument: annexation is not free. It has costs: the destruction of infrastructure assets, loss of life, capital flight, skilled labor flight, private sector boycotts, the burden of new sanctions and the expenditure of military action, occupation and administration.

The only reason to annex a country is if the expected gains offset these costs. Therefore, looting.

*This is what I mean by looting.

China knows that and doesn’t want to annexe Taiwan through violence. They would much prefer Taiwan to join with minimum damage. That’s always been their play book.

It is flexing right now because one, there might be a window of opportunity as the US is modernising its navy, two, it’s a way to keep Taiwan under the current status quo at time when American diplomacy has stepped up its own aggressive posturing towards China, three, it’s useful for Xi internally.

China is not trying to redirect Taiwan output to the mainland. As I said, Taiwan is right next door and already has a mostly integrated economy. They want to fold the island into China proper.

Taiwan is not and never was an economic annexion for China. That’s not the point. If you start from there, you are doomed to be wrong.

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