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It seems rather irresponsible to poke China in the eye like this, they are definitely going to scale up air, naval, and cyber intrusions in response. Very likel

It seems rather irresponsible to poke China in the eye like this, they are definitely going to scale up air, naval, and cyber intrusions in response. Very likely nothing significant will happen, but these heightened tensions increase the likelihood of accidentally sparking a real crisis.

stefan_ 4y ago
Yes, it's the fault of the person visiting an independent island, it's not the delusional, raging dictatorship next to it.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  Messing with the carefully managed status quo is foolish. China cares a lot more about Taiwan than the US does, if we goad them into action on this issue it's going to be a repeat of Ukraine. We will send them some donations and put Taiwanese flags on social media, but they would get devastated and occupied.
  - elteto 4y ago
    Are you sure China cares more about Taiwan than the US? Taiwan is a global, single point of failure for advanced CPU manufacturing. My guess is that the US will never allow this to fall in Chinese hands.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      AFAIK The confederate states of the US during the civil war thought that Europe would come to their aid to keep the price of cotton down. Cotton traders ended up making more money with the shortages so there was no incentive to do so. Expensive chips for a while is probably cheaper than WWIII.
      - elteto 4y ago
        Eh, I don’t think that anecdote is relevant. The production pipeline for cotton is extremely simple in comparison: add lots of manual labor plus land fertile for cotton and you get cotton. Many places on Earth would have fit that bill in those times. The US government can’t allow the Chinese to have absolute power and control over the technology that the _world_ runs on. It’s an existential threat. Can you imagine, at the height of the Cold War, the US outsourcing nuke construction to the Soviet Union?
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I’m pretty sure the Taiwanese factories are rigged to go, or at least those factories will be destroyed in the event of an invasion. Plus it’ll be easy to sanction China and prevent them from acquiring new fab tech to rebuild the factories. I’m pretty sure the US is ok with the world being set backwards a bit in tech if they get to reacquire chip leadership. A more cynical person could suggest that the US is agitating for a war in order to precipitate this very outcome.
        elteto 4y ago
        How long do you think it will take, in this scenario, for local US fabs to reach parity with TSMC? Intel has been trying for a decade. AMD is a TSMC customer. Your scenario only makes sense if the US was almost on the verge of achieving technological parity with TSMC, say within months or maybe a couple of years. But that is not the case. Heck, building a fab from scratch takes longer than that. What happens in the interim? And what happens to the rest of the world? The disruption on a global scale would make the pandemic look mild.
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        The main problem with building the factories in the US is doing it cheaply enough to remain competitive. When the competition is destroyed that is no longer a problem. The rest of us will just have to get used to paying more for less. Just because something is incredibly destructive doesn’t mean politicians won’t do it. I’m sure many people would like to punish TSMC customers for not buying American in the first place.
  - codyb 4y ago
    I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the situation. China's an export based economy that's going through a slowdown and still struggling with pandemic lockdowns. War would shut down the Taiwanese straight for shipping and it's one of their busiest export lanes in the world. It's not helping that their housing market is in pretty dire straights. So the CCP's not in super great water popularity wise (although sometimes wars can bring people together, I'm not sure that's as true with acts of aggression as it is with acts of defense). China and the US are both heavily dependent on Taiwan for semiconductor manufacturing, especially for state of the art chips. War would shut China off from that tap. Those labs are incredibly advanced and not easy to rebuild. And the US dependence on those chips give the US a strong reason to defend Taiwan. Both countries are ramping up their own chip production in order to make this less of an issue but it's certainly the case at the moment. An invasion across the Taiwanese straight _would not be a cakewalk_. China's military is certainly much stronger than it used to be, but at some point you need to move troops across that straight in greater numbers than jumping out of the back of bomber planes can provide. A mass landing is likely to result in huge casualties and may not be successful. The US has been arming Taiwan for decades now and it's certain they're planning for that cross channel invasion. Anti-China sentiment in the US is fairly strong at the moment and the current US President has said the US would defend Taiwan. China will invade when the US is divided on the issue and thus more likely not to step up to the plate. Similarly, where the US goes it'll have help from its partners. China's not in a great position at the moment, at the end of the day, despite a lot of rolling around on the ground trying to scratch for fleas the United States is still a pretty big dog in this world. And going toe to toe with it in something that's not a proxy war probably isn't something any regime has much appetite for. That's my assessment at the moment.
    - ghostwriter 4y ago
      Even without a hot active phase, potential escalation and the prospect of export issues with the US at this point would just fuel China's trade with Russia, as sanctions would become an unavoidable event, hence CCP wouldn't have a reason to think twice before maximising trade with all other sanctioned states. And the trade wouldn't happen in US dollars/western financial infrastructure either.
    - 4y ago
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    That is an absolutely gross misread of U.S. foreign policy with respect to Taiwan. Have you read anything at all about this subject matter? The U.S. had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan until 1980 for heaven's sake; this is nothing like the situation in Ukraine.
    - pseudo0 4y ago
      The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was nullified over 40 years ago. The US policy with respect to Taiwan since then has been strategic ambiguity, and we can see how well that worked out for Ukraine! They were in the same situation as Taiwan, being strung along by US assurances without a firm commitment. The parallels are obvious, and if I were a Taiwanese policymaker, I certainly wouldn't be counting on US military intervention.
      - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
        Thank you for reading the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Mutual_Defense_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Mutual_Defense_T... Go read this one next: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act ... which is still in force. Also refer to multiple occasions this year where Biden has said that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan was similar to NATO Article 5, or otherwise that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan: https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-says-america-will-defend-taiwan/ https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-s... Compare that with ... nothing at all of any similar kind of legislative or executive message w.r.t to Ukraine. There is no strategic ambiguity about the U.S. defending Ukraine military; the U.S. is absolutely not committed to that course of action and has never been - the strongest language on this point being a non-binding memorandum from 1994.
        pseudo0 4y ago
        I'm familiar with the Taiwan Relations Act, which means I know that it provides absolutely no guarantee of military intervention. What exactly is the relevance of the Taiwan Relations Act to the question of whether the US has guaranteed military intervention if China invades Taiwan? You are citing an irrelevant current law, and a treaty that expired 40 years ago, which doesn't inspire much confidence in your subject matter expertise. All Biden's statements prove is that he struggles to function without a teleprompter. The White House has repeatedly had to walk back his unscripted statements on Taiwan: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-back-taiwan-comments-china-military-three-times https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-back-taiwan-com... With respect to Ukraine, Ukraine hosted US and NATO training missions, did joint naval drills with NATO, and in December Biden was still promising Ukraine a path to NATO membership: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zel... As with Taiwan, with respect to Ukraine the US did not guarantee military intervention, but reserved the option to intervene and made statements to that effect. In recent months, they did clarify that they would not send US troops to intervene directly, but I expect we would see similar statements from the White House if China started preparing for an imminent invasion.
  - tuxoko 4y ago
    Did you completely ignore all the things China has done in the region to mess with the status quo? Keep appeasing to China will only make things worse until it's too late.
- ghostwriter 4y ago
  Unless there's something being done to the raging dictatorship, the event makes the dictatorship more determined to spread and demonstrate its influence over the region. And the US does nothing, it actually is unable to do anything to CCP at this point, but it shows the audience meaningless posturing that don't lessen dictatorship's influence.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    Maybe you can shortcut with the grandparent, it seems the two of you are in disagreement what course of action is emboldening the dictatorship.
    - ghostwriter 4y ago
      we are in agreement with at least one, but very important point - offering the dictatorship to escalate confrontation is counter-productive at this point (maybe not so much some time in the future under different circumstances), because the US will not be able to afford itself to save Taiwan if CCP decides to escalate it further this time.
- smcl 4y ago
  This isn't a random person who happens to want a little trip to an island, swooning with shock at the idea that it could provoke some kind of response. It's one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately doing something they know will provoke a response in an ascendant global power. It's an act of defiance which you can agree or disagree with (personally I think nothing good can come of this) but let's not kid ourselves that it's a sweet old lady on holiday.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Or is it one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately demonstrating that they recognize and support Taiwan and is willing to do so in spite of Chinese military threats and they need to back the fuck up?
- k_sze 4y ago
  1. Taiwan never declared independence. 2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship. There *are* democratic processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China. You just basically never hear about them in Western media.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Nominally having elections doesn't make you not a dictatorship. China's elections are a sham. It's a foregone conclusion who's going to win them all.
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      For an extreme example, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (commonly known as North Korea) also has elections, but everyone with a brain knows they're a sham.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Or the Deutsche "Demokratische" Republik. Mock elections seem to be a staple of many dictatorships. Not sure why, it's not like they're fooling anyone either domestically or internationally.
    - k_sze 4y ago
      That's because China is a meritocracy. Everybody has to work their way up from the very bottom in order to prove their worth - even people with connections will fail if they can't prove their worth. And so you don't end up with random dudes with no qualification whatsoever trying to run for important seats.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    >2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship. ... in practical terms, it's legally a one-party state in an authoritarian system of government - this is broadly recognized as the "one-party dictatorship" model.
  - bokchoi 4y ago
somehnguy 4y ago
What’s the alternative, just bend over backwards when China makes absurd demands?
- foverzar 4y ago
  - somehnguy 4y ago
    I don’t understand what your reply is trying to communicate. She scheduled a trip to Taiwan. China gets big mad as usual and says ‘don’t do that or else’. And you think not bending over backwards for the unreasonable and silly demand of their pathetic dictator is just ‘swinging your dick around’..? Makes zero sense to me.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Swinging your dick with no consequences would be something a bit more than just "i am going on a scheduled trip to an allied state". Xi is the one swinging his dick (the metaphorical version of which we are about to verify as rather impotent), threatening with some vague aggressive messages towards the US just to prevent a planned trip.

stefan_ 4y ago

Yes, it's the fault of the person visiting an independent island, it's not the delusional, raging dictatorship next to it.

pseudo0 4y ago
Messing with the carefully managed status quo is foolish. China cares a lot more about Taiwan than the US does, if we goad them into action on this issue it's going to be a repeat of Ukraine. We will send them some donations and put Taiwanese flags on social media, but they would get devastated and occupied.
- elteto 4y ago
  Are you sure China cares more about Taiwan than the US? Taiwan is a global, single point of failure for advanced CPU manufacturing. My guess is that the US will never allow this to fall in Chinese hands.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    AFAIK The confederate states of the US during the civil war thought that Europe would come to their aid to keep the price of cotton down. Cotton traders ended up making more money with the shortages so there was no incentive to do so. Expensive chips for a while is probably cheaper than WWIII.
    - elteto 4y ago
      Eh, I don’t think that anecdote is relevant. The production pipeline for cotton is extremely simple in comparison: add lots of manual labor plus land fertile for cotton and you get cotton. Many places on Earth would have fit that bill in those times. The US government can’t allow the Chinese to have absolute power and control over the technology that the _world_ runs on. It’s an existential threat. Can you imagine, at the height of the Cold War, the US outsourcing nuke construction to the Soviet Union?
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I’m pretty sure the Taiwanese factories are rigged to go, or at least those factories will be destroyed in the event of an invasion. Plus it’ll be easy to sanction China and prevent them from acquiring new fab tech to rebuild the factories. I’m pretty sure the US is ok with the world being set backwards a bit in tech if they get to reacquire chip leadership. A more cynical person could suggest that the US is agitating for a war in order to precipitate this very outcome.
        elteto 4y ago
        How long do you think it will take, in this scenario, for local US fabs to reach parity with TSMC? Intel has been trying for a decade. AMD is a TSMC customer. Your scenario only makes sense if the US was almost on the verge of achieving technological parity with TSMC, say within months or maybe a couple of years. But that is not the case. Heck, building a fab from scratch takes longer than that. What happens in the interim? And what happens to the rest of the world? The disruption on a global scale would make the pandemic look mild.
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        The main problem with building the factories in the US is doing it cheaply enough to remain competitive. When the competition is destroyed that is no longer a problem. The rest of us will just have to get used to paying more for less. Just because something is incredibly destructive doesn’t mean politicians won’t do it. I’m sure many people would like to punish TSMC customers for not buying American in the first place.
- codyb 4y ago
  I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the situation. China's an export based economy that's going through a slowdown and still struggling with pandemic lockdowns. War would shut down the Taiwanese straight for shipping and it's one of their busiest export lanes in the world. It's not helping that their housing market is in pretty dire straights. So the CCP's not in super great water popularity wise (although sometimes wars can bring people together, I'm not sure that's as true with acts of aggression as it is with acts of defense). China and the US are both heavily dependent on Taiwan for semiconductor manufacturing, especially for state of the art chips. War would shut China off from that tap. Those labs are incredibly advanced and not easy to rebuild. And the US dependence on those chips give the US a strong reason to defend Taiwan. Both countries are ramping up their own chip production in order to make this less of an issue but it's certainly the case at the moment. An invasion across the Taiwanese straight _would not be a cakewalk_. China's military is certainly much stronger than it used to be, but at some point you need to move troops across that straight in greater numbers than jumping out of the back of bomber planes can provide. A mass landing is likely to result in huge casualties and may not be successful. The US has been arming Taiwan for decades now and it's certain they're planning for that cross channel invasion. Anti-China sentiment in the US is fairly strong at the moment and the current US President has said the US would defend Taiwan. China will invade when the US is divided on the issue and thus more likely not to step up to the plate. Similarly, where the US goes it'll have help from its partners. China's not in a great position at the moment, at the end of the day, despite a lot of rolling around on the ground trying to scratch for fleas the United States is still a pretty big dog in this world. And going toe to toe with it in something that's not a proxy war probably isn't something any regime has much appetite for. That's my assessment at the moment.
  - ghostwriter 4y ago
    Even without a hot active phase, potential escalation and the prospect of export issues with the US at this point would just fuel China's trade with Russia, as sanctions would become an unavoidable event, hence CCP wouldn't have a reason to think twice before maximising trade with all other sanctioned states. And the trade wouldn't happen in US dollars/western financial infrastructure either.
  - 4y ago
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  That is an absolutely gross misread of U.S. foreign policy with respect to Taiwan. Have you read anything at all about this subject matter? The U.S. had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan until 1980 for heaven's sake; this is nothing like the situation in Ukraine.
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was nullified over 40 years ago. The US policy with respect to Taiwan since then has been strategic ambiguity, and we can see how well that worked out for Ukraine! They were in the same situation as Taiwan, being strung along by US assurances without a firm commitment. The parallels are obvious, and if I were a Taiwanese policymaker, I certainly wouldn't be counting on US military intervention.
    - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      Thank you for reading the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Mutual_Defense_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Mutual_Defense_T... Go read this one next: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act ... which is still in force. Also refer to multiple occasions this year where Biden has said that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan was similar to NATO Article 5, or otherwise that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan: https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-says-america-will-defend-taiwan/ https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-s... Compare that with ... nothing at all of any similar kind of legislative or executive message w.r.t to Ukraine. There is no strategic ambiguity about the U.S. defending Ukraine military; the U.S. is absolutely not committed to that course of action and has never been - the strongest language on this point being a non-binding memorandum from 1994.
      - pseudo0 4y ago
        I'm familiar with the Taiwan Relations Act, which means I know that it provides absolutely no guarantee of military intervention. What exactly is the relevance of the Taiwan Relations Act to the question of whether the US has guaranteed military intervention if China invades Taiwan? You are citing an irrelevant current law, and a treaty that expired 40 years ago, which doesn't inspire much confidence in your subject matter expertise. All Biden's statements prove is that he struggles to function without a teleprompter. The White House has repeatedly had to walk back his unscripted statements on Taiwan: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-back-taiwan-comments-china-military-three-times https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-back-taiwan-com... With respect to Ukraine, Ukraine hosted US and NATO training missions, did joint naval drills with NATO, and in December Biden was still promising Ukraine a path to NATO membership: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zel... As with Taiwan, with respect to Ukraine the US did not guarantee military intervention, but reserved the option to intervene and made statements to that effect. In recent months, they did clarify that they would not send US troops to intervene directly, but I expect we would see similar statements from the White House if China started preparing for an imminent invasion.
- tuxoko 4y ago
  Did you completely ignore all the things China has done in the region to mess with the status quo? Keep appeasing to China will only make things worse until it's too late.
ghostwriter 4y ago
Unless there's something being done to the raging dictatorship, the event makes the dictatorship more determined to spread and demonstrate its influence over the region. And the US does nothing, it actually is unable to do anything to CCP at this point, but it shows the audience meaningless posturing that don't lessen dictatorship's influence.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Maybe you can shortcut with the grandparent, it seems the two of you are in disagreement what course of action is emboldening the dictatorship.
  - ghostwriter 4y ago
    we are in agreement with at least one, but very important point - offering the dictatorship to escalate confrontation is counter-productive at this point (maybe not so much some time in the future under different circumstances), because the US will not be able to afford itself to save Taiwan if CCP decides to escalate it further this time.
smcl 4y ago
This isn't a random person who happens to want a little trip to an island, swooning with shock at the idea that it could provoke some kind of response. It's one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately doing something they know will provoke a response in an ascendant global power. It's an act of defiance which you can agree or disagree with (personally I think nothing good can come of this) but let's not kid ourselves that it's a sweet old lady on holiday.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Or is it one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately demonstrating that they recognize and support Taiwan and is willing to do so in spite of Chinese military threats and they need to back the fuck up?
k_sze 4y ago
1. Taiwan never declared independence. 2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship. There *are* democratic processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China. You just basically never hear about them in Western media.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Nominally having elections doesn't make you not a dictatorship. China's elections are a sham. It's a foregone conclusion who's going to win them all.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    For an extreme example, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (commonly known as North Korea) also has elections, but everyone with a brain knows they're a sham.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Or the Deutsche "Demokratische" Republik. Mock elections seem to be a staple of many dictatorships. Not sure why, it's not like they're fooling anyone either domestically or internationally.
  - k_sze 4y ago
    That's because China is a meritocracy. Everybody has to work their way up from the very bottom in order to prove their worth - even people with connections will fail if they can't prove their worth. And so you don't end up with random dudes with no qualification whatsoever trying to run for important seats.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  >2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship. ... in practical terms, it's legally a one-party state in an authoritarian system of government - this is broadly recognized as the "one-party dictatorship" model.
- bokchoi 4y ago

somehnguy 4y ago

What’s the alternative, just bend over backwards when China makes absurd demands?

foverzar 4y ago
- somehnguy 4y ago
  I don’t understand what your reply is trying to communicate. She scheduled a trip to Taiwan. China gets big mad as usual and says ‘don’t do that or else’. And you think not bending over backwards for the unreasonable and silly demand of their pathetic dictator is just ‘swinging your dick around’..? Makes zero sense to me.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Swinging your dick with no consequences would be something a bit more than just "i am going on a scheduled trip to an allied state". Xi is the one swinging his dick (the metaphorical version of which we are about to verify as rather impotent), threatening with some vague aggressive messages towards the US just to prevent a planned trip.