It reminds me of the Falklands. Argentina should have invested in wooing the Falklanders who weren't getting much attention from the British then.
Taiwan has critical tech and industry that is hard to replicate which china doesnt have access to but the west relies on.
So, if they take it peacefully they both grow in strength and weaken the rest of the world.
If they take it by force then they don't really lose much (barring nuclear exchanges) and cripple the rest of the world.
If the US intervenes then it's another discussion but depends on their military strenght calculations... They might want to fight conventionally the US outside their borders and get the US to give up like vietnam and win over their region by force...
That and historical reasons. If Xi pulls it off he's comparable to Mao.
If they take it by force, they will take a smoking hole in the ground where all that "critical tech" used to be.
If Xi pulls it off he's comparable to Mao.
Famous for getting tens of millions of his countrymen killed for no good reason?
Sure, but first, it's the rest of the world that loses it. With that tech manufacturing base gone, rest of the world might be forced to buy from china. China doesnt buy from Taiwan.
Second, people and documents will still be around similar to germany's rocket scientists, they can be put to work.
> Famous for getting tens of millions of his countrymen killed for no good reason?
Sure, that too. Dictators don't care about pople... (Putin is doing it too and if anything, killing your own people solidifies power...)
I was thinking more how he's perceived like some sort of deity by chinese people and was untouchable power wise.
They're not weak or stupid, the level of retaliation and sabotage in store against any attempt by China to take over would go down in history as some of the most ruthless and savage of all time.
Xi is just beating his chest. China is currently simmering - protests, civil unrest, and dissidence in general is up significantly over the last year or so, and they need to make bold public speeches to look powerful and in control. I don't think there's any risk of widespread public revolt, but they play these games and push propaganda because they have to, not because it makes sense.
China's been threatening to "unify" Taiwan for decades, more or less like clockwork. They missed their best opportunity to actually do it during Biden and covid - the US would likely have just let it happen at that point. With new US fabs popping up, we may reach parity with Taiwan chipmaking capabilities within a decade or less, and that makes the utility of Taiwan even less.
Urban resistance fighters and guerilla tactics from a hostile population makes taking over cities and towns like that more or less completely impossible. Any attempt by China to take Taiwan would end up looking like the US trying to "liberate" Iraq, with constant PR hits, human rights violations, way more money than they want to spend, or risking inciting major unrest if they just wipe out the Taiwanese population like monsters.
I don't think there's any real upside to actually taking Taiwan, it's more useful as a perennial jingoistic narrative than anything else at this point.
The deaths of a few million Taiwan people is not a big deal to ensure the future survival and stability of China and the CCP.
But Taiwan is a threat indirectly. Chinese people, but with much more political freedom than in the mainland, and with more prosperity - that's a threat to the Communist Party's legitimacy as ruler of China, in the same way that Ukraine is a threat to Putin's rule of Russia. It's somebody just next door, with approximately the same people, who's doing much better and is much more free. It makes the Chinese and Russians start to get ideas that maybe they could have that, too.
And Taiwan is more directly a threat, because Xi has explicitly made reunification with Taiwan a measure of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi's mouth made that problem, and now he can't back down without losing face.
> Are they willing to kill millions of people just to protect their own pride?
In a "face" culture? Yes, they may be.
Has he tried like golf or pickleball? Bro get a hobby.
There's one mention of Taiwan, in the eigth paragraph (of twelve).
"We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!"
I support an independent Taiwan, and given China's recent military exercises that encircled Taiwan, everyone's right to be cagey, but the speech itself doesn't focus on Taiwan, nor does it seem to escalate China's rhetoric.
To be fair, the Guardian article does provide the context of the military exercises, so I guess I'm complaining about the headline being overly alarming. A first in journalism, I'm sure /s.