My understanding based on the reports out of the military-industrial complex is that the decision over whether Taiwan falls sits pretty much entirely with the decision makers in Beijing. There isn't much the US can do about it. If they can't coerce Russia in Ukraine then they definitely can't coerce Chinese decision making about the security situation off the coast of China.

It is a bit late to use Taiwan and Ukraine as justifications for the US using a military solution. It isn't winning these fights.

The decision to invade sits with the leaders in Beijing. "The enemy gets a say", as the saying goes, and whether they would be successful is not obvious. It would be arguably the most complex amphibious invasion in history, definitely rivaling Normandy. The US has a lot of tools, both software and hardware, to bring to the fight in this scenario. Perhaps the question is on acceptable cost. There's also really only two times in the year when the weather in the Straight is calm enough to support that kind of invasion, and the sheer volume of hardware and systems they would have to move makes this kind of operation almost impossible to hide, though there are limited and imperfect ways to mask the preparation.

>It isn't winning these fights.

It absolutely is, right now, in Ukraine. The US has been able to use the Ukraine war as a massive real-time R&D laboratory for our weapons systems. The result is that Russia can no longer project naval power, their strategic air force is completely neutered, and they have tipped their hand for much of their signals and EW systems. The war is stalemated ... without the direct involvement of NATO (the wisdom of direct involvement is not relevant here).

This is to say that I disagree, there is a military solution to this problem.

I dunno, my read on Ukraine is it looks like the Ukranians are feeling their way toward some sort of a collapse. They haven't been able to stabilise the frontline, there was that discussion of lowering the mobilisation age earlier this year and the Russian negotiators don't seem to be in any hurry to make concessions. No certainty in a war but those aren't rosy signals.

Regardless, say China decides to take Taiwan. They set up a blockade with drones and missiles. If there is a counter the US has for that I haven't seen it, Taiwan pretty much disappears off the economic map. There is an interesting series of wargames [0] recently where CSIS looked at what might happen over the first 20 weeks of a blockade and it isn't pretty (let alone what presumably happens if China turns out to be willing to wage war for 12 months or more). My read on the "summery of game outcomes" section is that the US generally takes higher casualties than the Chinese, which is a not a position anyone wants to be in. Then the war drags out and we find out if the US has any idea how to manufacture ... I don't know what they'd need to maintain an attrition war like that. It looks quite hard and consequently the idea of material US support is probably a bluff. They've shown no willingness to bleed on behalf of other people.

Maybe if some sort of grand coalition of Asians comes together to fight and die protecting US hegemony in the Pacific it could work out well for the US. Crazier things have happened.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/lights-out-wargaming-chinese-b...

Australia, The Philippines, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and possibly France would join American military intervention. Not to mention Taiwan itself. Probably get logistical support from other places like Singapore, Thailand, etc.

American sentiment would change if mass casualties were inflicted on US troops.

This war scenario is different for Americans than Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. There is direct threat to the American homeland if Taiwan falls. Not to mention destroying our technology infrastructure and industry.

If China decides to annex Taiwan tomorrow, there is little the US can do about it without starting a nuclear war.

It would be the same as another power attempting to liberate Cuba from US punishment.

The US is not defending Taiwan for the sake of "supporting its people" it or because of TSMC. It's actually because Taiwan is part of the "First island chain", and it's crucial in keeping China away from taking the Pacific Ocean and threatening the US west coast. The US will throw everything it has to defend it. It is absolutely vital to US territorial security. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain

China wants Taiwan. Ideally not through bloodshed, but economically and strategically force them to reunite. Given the amount of trade and relationship between PRC and Taiwan, I would write off that possibility in the future.

I’m very unsympathetic to making China some boogeyman intent on world domination, but I have to say that speaking out against the government isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms there.

I mean, open criticism of the govt is super okay. Peeps do this all the time. Protests are part of daily life. But openly calling for an armed rebellion will get you arrested for sure, like in many other countries.

How about "our country should have a free market economy because I think that is morally correct"?

How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)

How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?

How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]

How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?

How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?

How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?

How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]

How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?

How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?

How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?

How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?

Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.

I've personally met Chinese people who were stopped by force or threat of force from saying what they wanted to say about domestic politics.

There are many selection biases in how I came to know the people that I do, and it's entirely possible that there are many, many more people who are quite happy with the government and/or its restrictions on speech. However, I can confirm that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressing a non-zero number of political dissidents.

If these people you know were publicly calling for the socialist system to be overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois liberal democracy, then I'm afraid to say I don't see anything wrong with this kind of oppression.

For example, I wish my country (Switzerland) were actively cracking down on Nazis, so oppression is okay for me. It really depends who's the target. Censorship is just a tool. One can yield it for good, or for bad purposes.

Can you see how this makes it look like the "socialist system" only survives by force, by physically preventing people from thinking and talking about its flaws? That it can't actually withstand criticism at all?

(That's exactly what I've personally believed for a long time, and your position tends to confirm that impression for me.)

Is it possible that you're not concerned about this issue because you follow a school of Marxist thought in which it's considered literally impossible for people to persuade each other about important political questions, because all people are constrained to believe particular things based on their situations?

Are you somehow committed to the idea that it's not useful or morally valid to debate about whether those ideas are right or wrong? From your discussion of the Chinese political speech issues, it seems like you actually think that -- if there were a way to enforce that -- I should not be able to try to persuade people that you're mistaken, because that's just how transparently evil my anticommunism is, or because people don't actually possess a faculty of reason, or something.

> Are you somehow committed to the idea that it's not useful or morally valid to debate about whether those ideas are right or wrong?

Well, it really isn't.

At the end of the day, ideologies are just fronts for material interests. You argue for your material interests, and they might be at odds with the material interests of the masses.

If a revolutionary movement wants to achieve its goals, it must take care that such deviations don't take root, especially if they use naïve liberal humanism and appeals to human emotion as Trojan horses.

Honestly, this applies to movements in general. You can see this in the USA. Trump's dictatorship was nurtured and empowered by naïve liberal humanist moderates who thought they could debate and 'when they go low, we go high' their way into power and stability.

Decry censorship and ideological rigidity all you want, your enemies won't think twice about using everything in their power to crush you.

How about saying you think the leader looks like Winnie the Pooh?

Satire and making fun of officials is also normal. Y'all took this meme way too seriously.

So you’re saying I could post a picture of Xi Jinping and say our country is broken because we’re lead by an idiot who looks like Winnie the Pooh while posting some ai mash up of the two and it would be fine? Even if it gained traction and was widely shared?

I honestly don’t believe that, but readily admit I could be in a propaganda bubble. Anything you can point to as examples of large scale mocking of powerful people being acceptable in China?

Wow, a real life tankie. I'm no fan of the neoliberal western order but you're delusional if you think China is in any way democratic.