I'm not arguing that China wouldn't wreck its economy by invading Taiwan. It would, and economic disaster would not be an overstatement. But it would be able t

I'm not arguing that China wouldn't wreck its economy by invading Taiwan. It would, and economic disaster would not be an overstatement. But it would be able to wage its war. For food it's fine, although people would certainly be eating much less pork for a long time. Oil is the critical limiting resource; China consumes around 15 million barrels a day. But it domestically produces 4 million barrels a day (it once was doing around 5, but shut down some as they became uneconomic), can scale up to around a million barrels per day of imports from Russia and Central Asia, and has a stockpile of around a billion barrels. Most manufacturing except for militarily relevant industries would be shut down, and it would impose domestic rationing to decrease its baseline consumption by a couple million barrels. Depending on how you model things, China could maintain its wartime footing for at least a year and potentially indefinitely. Painful for China, yes, but also economically horrendous for the rest of the world. As soon as the war starts, all of East Asia would be thrown into an immediate depression, as at a minimum 10% of economic activity is shut down overnight. Oil prices fall, putting severe pressure on oil producers whose economies themselves collapse. The EU and the USA themselves tumble into recession, as supply chains are destroyed. Domestic politics would react negatively to the new reality, and there'd be no Pearl Harbor event to motivate Western voters to prosecute a war for an island most can't even locate on a map. Everyone would be in for a world of pain, and everyone would want a resolution of the crisis as quickly as possible. If China starts a war, it will be because it believes it can maintain itself in an economic calamity longer than the US and its allies can.