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Comment by prmph | Hacker News Reader

I guess now would be a good time for China to make its move on you-know-who.

I'm starting to believe that China isn't going to make the move. It's winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world and will be able to leverage its growing soft power well beyond what Taiwan would provide. I just don't see them giving up the position the US has abandoned.

China's better move rn would be to go for the big soft power play and ditch the Russians for the abandoned Europeans.

China doesn't think in that way. It doesn't make permanent alliances. It is always open to reach limited, scoped deals in fields where it benefits them.

Yeah that sounds like a pretty good deal. Drop the bankrupt Russians and do a deal with us Europeans, a much richer market, to brace against US economic warfare.

I suspect that China might be Russia's Ukraine offramp. If Russia decides to pull out, China can come in and work as a negotiator and win brownie points with the EU. I could see them being able to continue working with both Russia and the EU in that future.

I'm starting to think so as well. The Chinese are typically cautious geopolitically, and very strategic. They may well have made the calculus that for the foreseeable future, they have more to gain from keeping the status quo re Taiwan while their rivals score own goals, waiting for a possible rapprochement with Taiwan on favorable terms.

That's something the factions in the Middle East miss: sometimes great change comes from patiently applying pressure and infiltrating from within, rather than a frontal attack.

I suspect that they are willing to wait a few more years until they have built up their own chip making capacity so that disrupting Formosa won’t strongly affect their own economy, while it will hinder other developed countries.

I'm not so sure about that. Taiwan pro-reunification party still grows, and its economy is hyper-specialized (not surprising, neocolonialism etc). If china's chip production capacity reach acceptable level (which it will), enough to put downward pressure on lesser chip, Taiwan economy might suffer enough that they vote for a reunification, probably as an autonomous regions (like Guangxi or Ningxia). That would be China's ultimate win.

Not just yet, they should wait for a little bit. The US isn't done depleting its inventory yet, the US might get itself in a lot deeper yet, and the US population will only detest the war even more given time. All of those things will help China take Taiwan. If Iran gets ugly enough the US population will just have that much less willingness to get involved in another major conflict. 3-18 months for Taiwan (9-18 more likely; China still needs some prep). There's no scenario where China isn't going to successfully take the island after this. They now know the US isn't at all prepared to stand off with them in coastal Asia. It would take years of surge production to get ready, the US doesn't have years re Taiwan.

If China is going in, we'll start to see large signs of that. They'll begin a number of prominent campaigns, including sabotage, propaganda, extremely large supply movements, and so on.

If China were to learn anything important from Russia and the USAs "swift" wars it's: don't do it. They'll have the upper hand but a determined government and population will bog down their efforts for years and potentially destabilize politics at home.

> The US isn't done depleting its inventory yet

Yes, reading articles like this one, I suspect it's going to be the lack of firepower that causes this administration to finally back out of the conflict. And with these number it sounds like it might be sooner than later.

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