Having spent much of my youth waking up and staring across the Straits every day, I question your use of 'only' in this thought. They may 'only' be 12 or so mi

Having spent much of my youth waking up and staring across the Straits every day, I question your use of 'only' in this thought. They may 'only' be 12 or so miles across, but the amount of concrete and fill that would be needed to dam the straits would dwarf anything even the Chinese could manage up with for another couple of hundred years, I imagine. This idea looks a lot more plausible on paper than it would in person.