Russia has energy independence and food security. China has neither. USA could achieve a lot just by blockading China, something China is in no position to challenge since most of their navy is a brown water navy.
Yeah, they can probably fight fairly well for a year or two with their reserves (depending on how much of the reserves are actually there.. corruption is an issue). But after that they risk catastrophic destabilisation within China. People don’t realise that Chinas main ongoing challenge is to keep mainland China itself stable. They spend much more on internal security than on external security. Chinas sabre rattling with Taiwan can be considered part of trying to maintain internal stability. It helps keep people focused on external enemies.
Taiwan is also an order of magnitude more difficult to invade. The yearly window for invasion is fairly small. It’s easy to see it coming. There’s only a couple of beaches suitable to land an army on, and it will be blanketed with mines within an hour of seeing the first invasion ships crossing the strait.
Ukraine has also demonstrated that a smaller nation can take out the entire navy of a bigger one with sea drones. Taiwan is now building their own drones.
I think drones will favour the defender, even if China could make more of them. Especially when laser weapons can cheaply take out drone swarms trying to drop bombs on the defenders. The Taiwan strait will be impassable for any large ship, and you need to cross with a large ship and get boots on the ground to successfully invade.
It's true that right now China's navy is much weaker than the US'. However, there are a few factors in China's favor here:
* China is building new navy ships at a much faster pace than the US
* China has LUDICROUSLY more total shipbuilding capacity overall than the US, like more than 200x as much
* China has a semi-militarized militia fleet that they already make use of that they can call on to help ferry soldiers around
* In a war around Taiwan, China would be able to commit essentially its whole fleet, while the US would still have to be concerned around interests in other parts of the globe. Plus the obvious home field logistical advantage in maintenance/repair being close by.
The US will still be much stronger in terms of navy for other parts of the world for a long time yet, but if it's a fight close to China, I think China may surpass the US in effective power within the next decade.
> There’s only a couple of beaches suitable to land an army on
China's been building some new vessels designed to mitigate this (sorry for linking to a video but it's the best source I've seen for this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klkpk_hO4FQ
Some of your points were true 10 years ago but not any more.
China has basic food secuirty, ie. there's enough rice and grain to feed the population. What it doesn't have enough is food for livestocks which means no steak at war time, but hardly a fatal blow. China gets most of its oil and gas from Russia, given what we know about Putin it's hard to see Russia cut off the pipeline to help US. Even if they do, I don't think it's enough to stop the war machine, 1/3 of China's electricity is generated by renewable energy, they also have a lot of coal, the reason they built the gas pipeline with Russia is to move away from coal.
Chinese navy is no longer a brown water navy, the 3rd aircraft carrier will be battle ready in the next couple of years and the 4th one is being built.
The assumption of US and allies completely blockade China's coast is very unrealistic, it's more likely the allied fleet will try to stop a blockage of PLA on Taiwan, which won't last a few months without external supply. And in term of drones, China is also a big player in the field. I don't think Taiwan has advantage on that. Ukraine can wreck blacksea fleet because it was a very out of date navy, unfortunately you can't say that to the Chinese one.
Difficult to land might be the only defence Taiwan has.
Yeah, they can probably fight fairly well for a year or two with their reserves (depending on how much of the reserves are actually there.. corruption is an issue). But after that they risk catastrophic destabilisation within China. People don’t realise that Chinas main ongoing challenge is to keep mainland China itself stable. They spend much more on internal security than on external security. Chinas sabre rattling with Taiwan can be considered part of trying to maintain internal stability. It helps keep people focused on external enemies.
Taiwan is also an order of magnitude more difficult to invade. The yearly window for invasion is fairly small. It’s easy to see it coming. There’s only a couple of beaches suitable to land an army on, and it will be blanketed with mines within an hour of seeing the first invasion ships crossing the strait.
Ukraine has also demonstrated that a smaller nation can take out the entire navy of a bigger one with sea drones. Taiwan is now building their own drones.
I think drones will favour the defender, even if China could make more of them. Especially when laser weapons can cheaply take out drone swarms trying to drop bombs on the defenders. The Taiwan strait will be impassable for any large ship, and you need to cross with a large ship and get boots on the ground to successfully invade.