I'm starting to see more headlines like Blinken Says China Wants to Seize Taiwan on ‘Much Faster Timeline’ and US must prepare now for China invasion of Taiwan: admiral. The timeline mentioned in that article is 2027, though I worry that some recent events might have pushed the timeline of aggression forward with the admiral mentioned in the article above suggesting that now a 2022 or 2023 timeframe might be in play.
On the Chinese side is Xi Jinpeng increasing his grasp on power, as seen in the former leader Hu Jintau's removal from the current Chinese Communist Party Congress and the country's zero-COVID policies despite vaccines which seem likely to do the country significant economic harm.
On the other side are Biden's new restrictions on the Chinese tech sector and their ability to import the latest generation of chips amidst other constraints. Here's one twitter thread I'd bumped into (for which you can find some related commentary here):
One major thing that might have previously made China hesitant to invade is the risk of blowing up TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer currently at the bleeding edge and the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer. As Gwern points out:
... to put it another way, if the CCP tries to invade Taiwan in the next 10 years, historians are likely going to point to 2-3 days ago as the pivot: it is now a razor blade cutting China's throat if AI and high tech in general is the future, with nothing more to lose and everything to gain from destroying TSMC so no one else can have it either.
Another relevant question that comes to mind is: if China were to attack Taiwan how would they do it? There are a lot of voices like this that suggests that this might mean more military buildup:
I'm not sure that they're right though. Did we see the dress rehearsal in August this year in response to Pelosi's visit? What we had was a 4-day de facto blockade which was described as follows at the time:
We now have an unprecedented series of four-day-long, round-the-island live-ammunition exercises featuring advanced warplanes, warships and missiles. The Chinese military designated six closure areas, one of which is merely 12 miles from Taiwan’s southern shipping hub of Kaohsiung. Beijing also warned commercial airliners to avoid wide swaths of airspace around Taiwan, in what amounts to a no-fly zone over major flight routes. Even though China portrays this as a step short of total encirclement, Taiwan’s defense ministry describes it as “a maritime and aerial blockade.”
What could work is something like this:
As the above notes, businesses tend to be risk-averse so a threat might be enough to bring most of that to a halt. Putin's been hinting at a risk of nuclear war as a way to hold off outside interference. Here China again has the TSMC card to play. Firing directly on a US military vessel is one thing and Taiwan is seemingly difficult to invade directly, but what if China were to threaten to attack an entity like TSMC in response to any outside attempts to interfere in a blockade?
The ability to blockade or invade are two different things, and China might be capable of the first without yet seemingly being capable of the second:
Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense concluded last year that China was not yet able to launch a full-scale invasion. The Pentagon’s most recent report on the Chinese military said such an invasion “would likely strain China’s armed forces” and create “a significant political and military risk” for Beijing.
But both reports acknowledge that China is capable of blockading Taiwan. This blockade, identified by the Pentagon as the “Joint Blockade Campaign,” would cut off Taiwan’s air and naval traffic and its information networks.
“Such a blockade could be the main effort, eschewing an attempted landing altogether, or it could be part of a larger invasion campaign,” Lonnie Henley, a retired US intelligence officer who twice served as Defense Intelligence Officer for East Asia, told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last February.
I'm really not sure how this'll play out internationally it it happens. Thus far despite what's been going on in Xinjiang, China managed to attract praise from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation. It's also much easier to get other countries to agree that something is an internal dispute to be resolved at that level when mainland China has kept most other countries from diplomatic recognition of Taiwan.
I'm still not quite sure what sort of number I'd put on the risk of blockade, but it seems to me substantially higher than than the risk of a full-blown invasion, one that I expect that recent moves have made much more probable, and one still not acknowledged to the extent it should be. Guess I can only wait and see what happens.
