1,000On the question of whether China would attempt to invade Taiwan by 2030, forecasters estimated a 43% chance of this occurring (range: 20% to 70%).
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/sentinel-minutes-102025-trump-tariffs
@derpy the US is backstabbing its allies, and in particular appeasing Russia with regards to its war of aggression in Ukraine. This makes the invasion of Taiwan significantly more likely.
@StellarSerene Could you elaborate on your reasoning for China's inevitable win?
Is it because of their lead in key technological verticals (drones, batteries etc.) or something else?
@elf Lead in tech is a result of the bigger picture. With the largest supply of high-skilled labor and state-permitted blatant neglect of labor's right, China's way is the answer to this capitalist world order. What wasn't achieved last century will come true by sad and ironical means, that you exploit the rules so bad no one want it anymore. Unlike last time when China can be easily isolated, when you trade with every one no one can stop you anymore because, well, profits. Brain-drain and foreign dumping used to be an issue too but luckily stupid western countries prevent that themselves with student visa checks and export control, basically guiding China to beat the rest of the world by itself. The history book pages about our era is going to be extremely funny.
A Trump ‘abandoning’ of Taiwan doesn’t necessarily result in an invasion.
War is politics by other means. Once the US establishes that it won’t go to war over Taiwan, the political calculation for those on both sides of the straits changes. Maybe talks resume under the 1992 consensus. Maybe a 1C2S formula is seriously canvassed.
There’s an interesting spin-off market idea here of “if the USA clearly signals that it will not go to war with China over Taiwan, will China invade”.
For example, see: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-fallacy
I'm fairly ignorant on this matter, but saw this comment (see image) on a Steve Hsu blog post (https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/08/strategic-calculus-of-taiwan-invasion.html) and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts or critiques of it.
@elf Amongst other things, this comment totally butchers the Shanghai communique, in which the US merely 'acknowledges' China's position on Taiwan without definitively agreeing to it and opposing the use of violence to resolve the situation. Most Western countries have similar positions on Taiwan. If the US was totally fine with China taking Taiwan by force, we would not have had a Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996 where the US sent two aircraft carriers to deter the PLA.
@elf you can test Bob's analysis by putting up some big limit orders in China-Taiwan markets and seeing if the site agrees with him😜
ASML machines have remote kill switches in case of Chinese invasion of Taiwan.