There are a number of key differences between the 1950 Hainan situation and 2020 Taiwan:
In Hainan, the PLA had a 15,000-strong Qiongya Column force that was fighting the Nationalists internally within Hainan itself, greatly hampering Nationalist efforts to ward off the external invasion. The PLA does not have a similar force within Taiwan itself.
The ten-mile difference vs. 100-mile distance meant that the PLA could resupply and reinforce much more quickly (a round-trip of only 1-2 hours instead of 7-10 hours.) It also greatly reduced the time exposed at sea during the vulnerable transit. Each vessel make many more transits.
Technology has advanced greatly in favor of defenders since 1950. Antiship missiles didn’t exist back then in 1950; Taiwan now has or will have Hsiung Feng II and III and truck-launched Harpoons in its inventory, along with ship or aircraft launched Mavericks, Harpoon, Hellfire, etc. A single CBU-97 sensor fuzed cluster munition now does the work of two dozen antitank weapons. Assuming that Taiwan had detected such an invasion in advance, the waters would likely also be sea-mined. In addition, Taiwan would be able to muster close air support with Apache and Cobra helicopters in a way it couldn’t at Hainan in 1950. There are also semi-automated coastal defenses like the Sanjuen system.
There was much more parity in numbers at Hainan. The PLA and Nationalist forces were both roughly equal numbers apiece. Whereas China currently would have a difficult time landing 150,000 or more troops with its current limited PLA sealift capacity, but Taiwan could muster reservists and regulars of double or triple that number to a beachhead quite quickly due to the small and interconnected nature of the island, especially if it were a landing near Taipei, such as Yilan, Taoyuan or Keelung. Most the entirety of the greater Taipei region can be reached by one on foot from one end to the other within half a day, within an hour by vehicle.
At Hainan, the Nationalists were able to evacuate to Taiwan when they realized they were losing the battle; they knew in advance they had the backup option of doing so. It can thus be argued that the Nationalists didn’t really fight with full effort in 1950. Should China invade Taiwan today, on the other hand, it would be a backs to the wall situation for Taiwan - nowhere to retreat or go - “This is it.” The Taiwanese war effort can therefore be expected to be considerably tougher.
It should also be noted that the Chinese effort to capture Hainan still took a full 2 months in order to succeed.
This mostly- but another factor is also that the MSM tends to portray, or see, China as a victim. The vast majority of CNN/BBC/WaPo/Reuters articles about Taiwan vs. China tend to use language like “American arms sales to Taiwan anger China,” “Taiwanese bid to join the WHO, riling Beijing,” “U.S. governmental official visits Taipei and praises President Tsai, provoking China.” Everything is always couched in terms of China being a wounded victim.
If there were a Taiwan war and the U.S. intervened, you can expect the MSM to run the same narrative, but on a much bigger scale.
I agree that the only way China would invade Taiwan is if it believed that the U.S. would stay out.
U.S. carrier groups in the region serve the same function as troops along the border of the Korean DMZ. If the U.S. sails a carrier group into the area and China attacks it, it would guarantee a war with the U.S. Sinking a large carrier could kill thousands of sailors. There’s no way the U.S. would let that go without a retaliatory response.
Also, it’s folly to compare militaries based on sheer size or even the quality of the individual components. The U.S’s strength is that its forces are highly integrated. The U.S. is far more experienced and better trained than China’s military. It has mopped the floor with militaries that on paper looked at least partially competitive, because those militaries simply couldn’t match the U.S’s capacity to organize complex operations involving numerous different assets. And you can’t just build that capability. You have to learn it and evolve it.
Also, China has to play good global citizen or risk having its economy ripped out from under it. China is highly dependent on foreign trade. If the world decides China is no longer playing fair, they could cripple it.
Finally, China has been engaged in a long-timeframe plan to subvert its rivals through infiltration, information war, bribing other countries into their sphere with ‘belt and road’ initiatives, etc. The Coronavirus issue has already shone a spotlight on some of this, and China is already experiencing blowback. If they invade Taiwan, it will destroy the last decade’s effort to ‘win’ economically and through subversion. Already we’re seeing pressure on Universities to divest themselves of Chinese influence, and technology theft by China is becoming a much bigger public issue.
If China were smart, it would offer up some mea culpas, reassure the world that they are good global citizens, then quietly go back to undermining and subverting other countries through non-military means.
Ok, sorry…I’m touchy about this whole being accused of being a closet or even an open Trump supporter. It’s why I took a break, and I don’t want to go down that path again. My apologies.
Definitely agree here. China is great at playing the victim card, as well as trotting out the racism card. They know how we react to this sort of thing, and they play it for all it’s worth. And this doesn’t just go for the press. There is a lot of folks at the State Department who are still in the mental mode of ‘we need to try and not anger Beijing’ and ‘if we just give into them and they are successful they will eventually become a democracy and a good world neighbor’. A lot of Europeans are in this mode as well. And China knows it and plays to that, knowing full well that they (the CCP) can’t make any sort of concession towards anything like democracy or even free speech. They use it against us, and if we criticize them they play the victim and the racism card, and our press goes along. Some of that is just momentum…they always have done this…but some of it, especially in the last few years, is because the CCP has taken off the gloves and showed the iron fist. Anyone who has been paying attention has seen this, most notably with the NBA thing and Taiwan, or on the government level with what the CCP is doing with Australia right now. But there are tons of examples of this if you even dig in a little. Companies know, if they don’t toe the line, they get cut off from the sweet, sweet China money, and often attacked internationally by CCP sympathizers even in their own countries.
Again, respectfully, can you use the Chinese government instead of the CCP please? The CCP is not the Chinese government and vice versa, and the CCP contains the word “communist”, which is an inflammatory term.
China’s big stick is cutting off access to the Chinese domestic market. For example, China is a significant revenue stream for the NBA.
I fail to see the direct leverage that China holds over the main stream media. Most western media is blocked in China anyway. The NY Times is not going to run negative articles because they are concerned over what China thinks and the lost subscription revenue? Or that the NY Times is scared China will overtly lean on the NBA to pull ad revenue?
The Chinese “controlling” or even “greatly influencing” the main stream media needs to have a better case than your say so. It doesn’t even pass the smell test. And the non-mainstream media has it’s own set of problems with trying to pawn off conspiracy theories as proven fact.
The Chinese and the Soviets showed us that size counts for a lot.
The WWII German army was better in every way than the Soviet army in all the ways you mentioned. Look where that got them.
In Korea, the Chinese came streaming across the border. American artillery shredded them…but they kept coming and came within a whisker of pushing the US off the peninsula.
If the other side is willing to lose the troops because they have the troops to spare I would not have as much faith in US military superiority.
In the case of Taiwan it is the navy that matters and there the US still beats China pretty well but China is growing their navy. They know the US keeps them in check there and they are working towards that not being the case.
Again, no, I won’t. I’ve been calling them the CCP…on this board…for over a decade, and off this board since before most people here were born. I’m not going to change that because you and a few others don’t like the communist connotations or something because it’s not PC or something today. Not unless a mod makes me…and if they do that will probably be it for me. Feel free to petition them, maybe start a thread in ATMB…would be a great way to get rid of me at least.
You fail to see the large, multi-page ads costing millions or 10’s of millions that the CCP and their state run media regularly runs in things like our struggling new papers? Or the money they give networks to run Chinese state run programming? Or the vast sums for their Confucius Institutes? It’s pretty much everywhere, and in everything.
I’m not here to make a better case for it. You will believe what you will believe, and this thread is about Taiwan. It’s funny that you fail to see this stuff, but it’s not worth my effort to convince someone who won’t be convinced on this subject. I learned that lesson here, if nothing else. Did you want to talk about Taiwan and the subject of the thread?
Where should one get news/information about China that’s not tainted by propaganda? Who’s not afraid to tell the truth? Obviously none of the traditional guard. OAN?
Look for news organizations that have been banned or thrown out of China as a good indicator. Because if they are still able to go into China, they are toeing the line. If not…not. You can also look at media that gets some funding from CCP state run media…and, again, those who don’t. Basically, if they dance around the whole Taiwan issue, or use ‘Taiwan province of China’ or similar things, those are good indication they are toeing the line to one extent or another.
Another is…do they THINK they can get some market penetration in China? This is why YouTube, for instance, has had a hidden post eraser for anything that calls people, oh, say fifty cent army or some variant of that (I tried it here, and was glad to see we don’t have that…so, SDMB not in the CCPs pocket :p). Facebook and Twitter to extents also fall into this group. Then there is Hollywood, who has been toeing the line so they can be one of the 21 allowed (and thus paid) movies allowed each year in China.
The CCP has a variety of ways of doing all of this, and it’s really not even that much of a secret…unless you simply don’t want to be bothered to even look a little bit. The NBA thing should have been a huge alarm as to how they operate, but people don’t seem to really have thought about the implications, despite how prominent this was. It’s not even the tip of the iceberg.
But the geographic factors work both ways. China may not have a lot of choices about where to fight. But neither does Taiwan.
Taiwan can’t fall back to its interior. It doesn’t have that much space to fall back to. If Taiwan loses the battle on the beaches, it will have effectively lost the entire war.
I’m sure Taiwan has devoted a huge amount of thought to this subject. But ultimately they have to work within the restraints of the numbers. They’re a country of twenty-five million people. They can’t expect to come up with a plan for winning a war against a country with a country that had fifteen hundred million people.
On this, we are in full agreement. Taiwan’s only realistic hope of winning a war against China has to involve the United States fighting alongside them. If America stays out of the war, Taiwan loses.
While Russia gets all the attention these days, China’s a lot better at political manipulation and a lot more embedded in our open economic and political systems than people realize.
More worrisome is that the U.S. is in a state of obvious social, economic, and political decline, such that it is rapidly losing its ability to coordinate any kind of meaningful response against China (against Russia, too, which was the whole point of their involvement in our 2016 election).
Been saying and thinking it for a while now: I think the only thing that can stop China, is China, which is not to say that they won’t have hiccups or that China will necessarily be a rich country. But it’ll be unrivaled in terms of global power.
The only way to stop them is to form strong pro-democratic coalitions, but the so-called “leader of the free world” and country most capable of bringing that coalition to effect, is basically AWOL.
I was reading on CNBC that YouTube has been deleting comments that has similar phrases :
“ If comments contained the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) then they were picked up by YouTube’s comment filters and deleted in around 15 seconds, The Verge reports”
It will be pretty rough on the PLAN and PLA, for sure, but yeah…China can win this IF the US stays out and if they want it badly enough to pay the price, both in terms of the cost to their military and internationally for the backlash. I think China’s actual capabilities are low wrt this kind of operation, and it will be a total cluster fuck for them, but with enough missiles and air craft spent on Taiwan they can clear a path to send in what few landing assets they have…and probably a bunch of commandeered water craft and commercial sea lift ships. The Taiwanese will hurt them, but they can’t really stop them because their island is too small, and it’s too far inside of China’s massive missile envelop. Their navy will fight, but, again, they are too close to China’s missiles and air craft, and China’s navy, green as it is, is a lot bigger and more modern than what Taiwan has. I wouldn’t even like to think about what the causalities would be on China’s side…or Taiwan’s for that matter…but if China and the CCP REALLY want it, they can take it. IF the US stays out of it. And Japan. And Australia. But mainly the US and Japan. The Japanese could probably do a hell of a lot wrt air and sea assets if they chose too…but I don’t think they or anyone else would if the US steps back.
For what it’s worth, I have always considered your posts to be intelligent commentaries on the topics under discussion even when we disagree. Which is not something I associate with Trump supporters.
I really don’t want to keep this going, but you asked a honest question and don’t seem to be…well, it seems an honest question, so I’ll answer it. The ‘communist bandit’ thing is obvious, even if you don’t know that historically it was used by the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war, as well as later as the internet came into being. The 50 cent (now it’s 70 cent) army thing is basically because the CCP and their state run media have a bunch of internet troll types who post pro-Beijing commentary, and have been called out on it…so, they are sensitive to both terms as well as a few others. And this filter can either be using the Chinese term or the English term.
What’s more interesting is asking…WHY would YouTube have such an algorithm to automatically delete posts with those specific terms that really only piss off the CCP? THAT is an interesting question, which, sadly, has nothing to do with this thread, so I’ll leave it there. I will say thanks for actually bothering to google this and look at that CNBC link. There are a lot of others. You could try ‘western media blocked in China’ or some variant on that to see not just US but other media that has been blocked by the CCP. You can do something similar for movies and actors if you are interested. Like I said, this stuff isn’t even that hidden…it’s really out there in plain sight for anyone who bothers to look. Kind of what asahi is saying a few posts up, though I’m a bit less pessimistic than he is on this. I think the world IS waking up to this, and I’m encouraged by countries like Australia or Canada, by the president of the EU, by Japan and many other countries and individuals who are pushing back, even if just a bit, against the CCP and their narrative. I wish we had a better president at the helm during this critical time, for more than this issue, but it is what it is. What is encouraging is that despite us having an idiot at the helm, other countries are stepping up or at least not lying down and taking whatever the CCP wants to dish out to them. At least for now.
If we end up fighting a war with China, I hope we have Australia and Japan fighting on our side. And also South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK.
But with all due respect to these countries, I feel they are not going to defeat China unless we’re in it.
I’m not 100% certain China would lose a war against the United States. But I don’t see them losing any war that doesn’t involve the United States.
The only other country which I feel can pose a credible threat to China is Russia. But I’m even less certain about their chances of beating China than I am about America’s. And for that reason I don’t see a war between China and Russia on the horizon. Putin and Xi have no vital interests in direct conflict and both are too astute to risk losing a war over anything less than a vital interest.
Could you explain this? Xi is both President of the People’s Republic of China and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China as well as Chairman of the Central Military Commission. It’s my understanding that he considers the CCP as synonymous with China, as well he should since he’s in charge of both. There are no real competing parties and no real competing political or social entities. And definitely no military policies that are not controlled by him.
My understanding could be flawed; I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m sincerely asking why you would insist on saying something that seems so counterintuitive to me.
It’s pretty much everywhere, and in everything.