China launches live-fire drills encircling Taiwan | Hacker News Reader

China launches live-fire drills encircling Taiwan

theguardian.com

39 pointspinewurst25 comments

Practically, what kind of country does this?

Rhetorically, what kind of country does this?

Culturally, what kind of country does this?

Perhaps they're just copying the USA. You know, the action against Venezuela and the threatening of Denmark with the annexation of Greenland.

These types of actions from China pre-dates that, even if there are similarities.

Isn’t Taiwan legitimately a threat to the CCP, though? Not in the sense that Taiwan the country can do anything to China the country, but Taiwan’s government used to be China’s government, right? It’s like an exiled royal family. And since Taiwan has the government type that the west supports, if the Chinese people at some point become sufficiently unhappy with the CCP, the Taiwanese government could appear as an alternative and it has a historical claim to do so and the west could back them (with a morally coherent and therefore defensible to its own people story for doing so). If I was CCP leadership I probably wouldn’t feel good about Taiwan either. This is also probably the real reason why the USA supports them, by the way. It isn’t about defending democracy, or industry there or whatever. It’s like if Russia was protecting the Confederate government that had fled to Puerto Rico. America probably wouldn’t like that. It’s weird that we have such a hard time looking at things from other people’s perspective, and instead project some moral framework on top of everything and whoever violates it is “bad” or whatever.

I think you're mistaken if you assume that many of the US people whose opinions matter, senators and the likes, are not supportive of defending Taiwan for boring ideological reasons along the lines of "it's a democracy". I don't doubt that there are some people who share the line of thinking you propose, but I would realistically expect them to be in the minority.

Well I don’t mean to suggest that random senators feel this way, I agree with you that they probably don’t. I mean the groups that actually make policy based on realpolitik interests probably feel this way, because it is the thing that actually makes sense (and while morally bad sounding to admit is totally coherent with historical great power competition). Who that is I’m not totally sure. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that the people running the show are evil but smart, as opposed to good but stupid.

Cowardly bully, they've removed seventy percent of seated military leadership in the latest purge. Communist Party zombies in China need a heart to heart check.

US ?

im not worried about Taiwan it has sufficient deterrence against any sort of land invasion. China might be able to launch a lot of air and missile strikes but if pushed to the brink Taiwan could use the ultimate trump card that is targeting the Three Gorges dam with its advanced cruise missiles.

secondly, JSDF and US Navy offer overwhelming reinforcement if it looks like Taiwan would fall and China's PLAN would not be able to face the two most powerful navy in the world.

If the United States and Japan dare not send troops at that time, remember to commit seppuku.

I genuinely suspect that they might suddenly launch an attack during some future military exercise. Yesterday I was discussing investments with friends, and both China and the United States are competing for and stockpiling non-renewable resources. As long as a war does not actually break out, this kind of hoarding will not stop. So I bought some non-ferrous metals funds.

Down to one day warning from three days. Next one is probably going to be few hours and then normalize into surprise exercises.

My thinking is that China does not want to cause a regional arms race and so will want a very short decisive action(hours), and then quickly dismantle the whole aparatus and then leave taiwan as a "semi indipendent" territory with integration of military, customs and courts to the mainland.

When mainland China resumes full control of taiwan it will be a , sudden, vast, utterly overwhelming , and almost bloodless take over. To put things in perspective, mainland China has an excess male population of military service age, larger than the total population of taiwan. So staffing is not a problem. China is working on building a fully modular shipping container based ultra high tech missle and surface warfare systems package, to instantly convert a container ship, into a full on bad ass navy ship, so will have full spectrum area dominance. China OWNS drone production, and will have military liasons embeded in the Russian forces fighting in the ukrain. It goes on and on, China is HUGE, and taiwan is smol, and taiwan made the mistake of claiming ALL of mainland china as there property,, and will soon have that claim, tested, all in acordance with international law, or whatever passes for that. And again, china's concern is to make this a blip in the media cycle that gets no real traction and is gone overnight. The current drills are a signal that if the US goes into Venezuela or other countrys, China may do it the messy(er), way, now, but would prefer another scenario.

What would the outcome be if China just decided that Taiwan was independent at this point and left her to govern herself?

(I'm looking for speculative answers, not so interested in "not going to happen").

just? decided! those two words realy dont go well together without citing precidents.

I was hoping for a real answer, since you obviously have quite a knowledge and an interest in posting about this topic.

Playing word games isn't really making decent discussion.

Taiwan needs nukes. Just a few.

I would bet that they already do.

Come on man, from where? It's not like they're Israel and the US gave them a few.

Don't see why not, Taiwan's silicon is a global security asset.

They’ve literally been caught developing nukes in the past and were talked down. They had their own domestic plutonium production.

https://isis-online.org/books/taiwans-former-nuclear-weapons...

Everyone needs nukes. Iraq and Afganistan needed them. Koreas needed them. Vietnam needed them. Cuba needed them.

We should make proliferation world wide goal. More nukes every nation has the better for world peace. It is only way to ensure peace.

Now it looks like Venezuela would have great and extremely justified reasons to have lot of them.

Nukes as a Service. See you at the YC Spring 2026 Batch!

You can add Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine to the list.

And of all these countries, nobody screws w/ N Korea. (Nukes!)

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