Question: what about if the thing they’re worried about isn’t about letting it fail, but rather geopolitical and military risk? Could the lead time to get the new companies up and running to fill In the gap be too long for them to not consider it too big of a risk of letting them fail?
geopolitical and military risk
There is a non-zero chance that China decides to simply seize Taiwan in the next decade or two.
Militarily there's absolutely nothing to prevent that unless we're willing to go nuclear or launch a land invasion of China (lol) or something; the idea of our carrier groups being an effective deterrent under a constant rain of missiles a couple hundred km from China's mainland is beyond delusional.
Since China & USA can't invade each other (LMAO) and a nuclear exchange would be suicide, any conflict in the South-China sea would have to be standoff - lobbing cruise missiles at the other non-stop. And the US doesn't even have that front locked down.
Despite spending $800b/y, the US military has a stockpile of just 4k Tomahwaks (as of 2020). If we translate China's production-spamming to the Taiwan situation, then we can safely assume they have a stockpile of missiles that dwarfs that several times. And since they're projecting power in their backyard, it'll be a logistical walkover, especially with how the CCP tends to get things done quickly and at scale.
Sorry if this feels off the point, but your comment just got me thinking about the SCS/Taiwan situation.
The idea of winning a conventional war in China's backyard after 10-20 years of them building toward it is absurd. And nuclear war is uh, nuclear war. Not really a "winner" there.
The only thing stopping China is obviously the huge financial incentive of losing their biggest trading partner(s). That will obviously be an enormous loss for them. At some point though they may calculate that the long term gains are worth it, I don't know the calculus there.
Just decades of sleeping at the wheels finally catching up.
So China dosen't have time on it's side. A hot war in one of the most busy regions would likely immediately cause a global recession as supply chains collapse, and the US can blockade oil and resources from the Middle East. This isn't like sanctions, if it goes on long enough. And remember that America can continously target and destroy their infrastructure and naval dockyards, China cannot. They've got great industrial capacity, but this war likely won't last long enough for them to actually finish building new ships, if the facilities even exist by then.
Well, some Chinese nationalists argue that strikes on the mainland will cause the CCP to start firing nukes at West Coast in retaliation as some sort of "city-trading" game, and that the Chinese will be more willing to sacrifice millions than the Americans at that, but we'll see if we get to that.
It would also be a world war at that point, so, I don't know that their plans would be restricted to US targets.
China knows that the cost would be devastating for them and the larger world economy as well, for the reasons you said. It would be at least a decade or two until the world economy recovered.
But China seems able and willing to play the long game in ways that the US (with our shorter election cycles) fundamentally cannot and if they are thinking strategically they know that this is one of their key advantages for this sort of conflict. I am not entirely sure that they wouldn't be willing to trade, say, 10-20 years of darkness (Cultural Revolution-style?) for 100 years of Chinese world supremacy atop a new world order.
It would also be a world war at that point, so, I don't know that their plans would be restricted to US targets.
China knows that the cost would be devastating for them and the larger world economy as well, for the reasons you said. It would be at least a decade or two until the world economy recovered.
But China seems able and willing to play the long game in ways that the US (with our shorter election cycles) fundamentally cannot and if they are thinking strategically they know that this is one of their key advantages for this sort of conflict. I am not entirely sure that they wouldn't be willing to trade, say, 10-20 years of darkness (Cultural Revolution-style?) for 100 years of Chinese world supremacy atop a new world order if (huge if) they thought it was achievable.
But they are also not dumb, and won't fight a war they can't win.
I'm old enough to remember people's endlessly repeating this about Japan in the 1980s.