Depends on your definition of ‘lose’…or what win and lose even mean in this context. If China tries a forced entry invasion of Taiwan with the US supporting Taiwan, I don’t see how China could take the island. But the US could, say, lose a carrier or several ships and take it in the shorts on Guam, say, and certainly our installations on Taiwan itself. It will be bloody, but the Chinese wouldn’t be able to successfully invade Taiwan with the US on board. And, basically, if the US is on board, I can’t see Japan staying out of it. It’s possible India might join in too. And Australia. And South Korea. But Japan is our pretty staunch ally, and they are also pragmatic…if the US steps back, it would be bad for Japan eventually. They aren’t going to allow that.
Winning in the US context would be preventing China from taking Taiwan and pushing them back…at least that’s the only realistic war goal I see. In that context, a US ‘win’ is…well, not a sure thing, but I think highly probable. For China, it would definitely be a lose, regardless of if they took out a US carrier, or even multiple US ships and installations. They will have failed to take Taiwan, and ruined their international reputation, as well as shown weakness to their people, who aren’t universally in love with the CCP at the best of times. Plus, regardless of your thoughts about the US on many things, there is zero chance that China would be unscathed back home. While Guam, Taiwan, several US installations regionally would undoubtable get hit hard, so would many coastal facilities and infrastructure in mainland China…and that would be really bad for them.
China may take Taiwan but if they lose so much of their surface navy (as an example) in the process it might be a loss. China would be unable to assert themselves elsewhere for a long time as they tried to rebuild. People they have lots of…ships are harder to come by.
Also, presumably, they want to take Taiwan intact. The island is not wealthy for its resources but for its tech resources and trade (people). If China wins only by flattening the island what have they gained? They will have lost huge amounts of their military and have an island of rubble that will take them decades to put back together. If that is the best they can hope for they are better off just spamming missiles at the island and wrecking it. If they did that they’d become an international pariah.
I know China is good at taking the long view but this is a tough one, even for them.
And we’re discussing a possible military action. It’s worth remembering that the People’s Liberation Army is not the armed forces of the People’s Republic of China. They’re the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao famously observed that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and the communists made sure they never handed over control of the guns.
China (the CCP actually) isn’t really great at the long view, IMHO anyway. But that’s neither here nor there. I agree with you that a Pyrrhic victory is a likelihood. But just looking at the OOB, there is a pretty large disparity of forces. Even factoring in that the PLA and various PL-something variants for the other services are poorly trained and poorly lead, and that Chinese systems are often…irregularly manufactured, let’s say…still puts this pretty overwhelmingly in China’s favor. Their missiles alone (and just to clarify, I’ve been sticking strictly to conventional weapons, we aren’t getting into nukes) would seriously hurt the Taiwanese air forces, as well as soften up ground defenses, hit logistics hubs and naval assets. China has a LOT of missiles that are in range of Taiwan, and they would be using them…they would have no choice, really. Taiwan can and would knock many down of course, but no one…not even the US…could knock them all down or even enough to not get hurt badly. Then there is the PLAAF. Again, poor training, poor leadership, but a lot of air craft in range and able to put ordinance on target. Same goes for the PLAN…lots more modern ships than Taiwan.
I would say that China’s military would get hurt pretty badly, even if things went their way…which I doubt, as I don’t think they are prepared for anything like what they would get…they could be looking at 30 or more percent losses. The landing forces might be a hell of a lot higher in the first few waves. But China could do it. Whether we think it would be Pyrrhic or not, they could do it at the cost of a lot of deaths…IF the US stayed out of things.
The thing is, and I mentioned this earlier, I’m not sure the CCP agrees with this assessment. I think that THEY might think they COULD do it…and also weather the political shit storm that would follow. Hell, they might think they could control the narrative enough to make that shit storm not happen, or be stifled. They don’t seem to grasp the fact that other countries can’t just shut this sort of thing down. Look at how they are still hammering on Canada about this Meng Wanzhou thingy, and how they are still trying to pressure the Canadian government to give in. They really don’t get that Canada has a separation of powers and can’t just do that, so they are still trying to pressure Canada on this.
Again, total population size is not relevant in an invasion that involves crossing a 100-mile expanse of water. It would be very relevant in an invasion of neighbor that shares a direct land border (such as Korea, Russia or Vietnam) in which China could simply flood in massed manpower on foot or vehicles and overwhelm via numbers, but with water your only way to cross is by air or sea. That serves as a tremendous bottleneck to the transportation of troops. It wouldn’t matter if China’s population were 140 billion instead of 1.4 billion; if they don’t have enough sealift or airlift capability, their chances of a successful amphibious invasion are slim to none. Soldiers cannot fly, nor can they swim a hundred miles.
That geographical advantage is one reason islands have historically been very difficult to conquer. The British Isles, for instance, have not been successfully invaded since the Battle of Hastings in 1066. During World War II, small islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa extracted a terrible price in Allied lives.
If the island’s defenders sink enough invading ships or shoot down enough air transports, the invasion becomes guaranteed to fail. That is the main reason Taiwan has placed so much focus on anti-air and antiship capability the past half century.
I think you think missiles are some kind of magical weapon.
They aren’t.
Missiles that can range 100+ miles from China to Taiwan are not super-duper accurate and not super numerous (expensive). They can hit within an area but not likely to hit moving ships and bunkered military or aircraft.
The US learned this in WWII. Battleships would pound the crap out of a landing area and when the troops swarmed in there were still thousands of Japanese waiting. And that was artillery that could see its targets. So, so much worse than any missile bombardment. Many thousands of shells from 15 miles versus a few hundred missiles from 100+ miles with smaller warheads…not even close.
Most missiles are short(ish) range meaning most will need to be fired from units close to the area. Which means they are also in missile range.
The Chinese have a lot of people but ships and planes are limited. Even if they overwhelm Taiwan they are back to a Pyrrhic victory. Losing so many units that they are ineffective for the next ten years.
Given that the loss of face for a Chinese government that lost a war over Taiwan could result in the downfall of that administration (not the fall of the CCP itself necessarily, but immense consequences for Xi or whoever else is in charge at the helm), there is a significant likelihood that China would resort to going nuclear - and not necessarily at the end, either. Twenty years or so ago, there was an analyst who suggested China would use nukes at the very beginning of such a war as a warning to the USA to stay out - not a direct attack, but rather, nukes detonated ahead of an American carrier group to warn of the consequences of sailing further.
But it’s a handy way of pointing out the overwhelming superiority in size that China has over Taiwan. That overwhelming superiority is reflected in every aspects you might want to compare: population, troops, military supplies, economic resources, ships, planes, missiles - no matter what you’re comparing China is going to be able to keep pouring it in until Taiwan runs out.
People keep pointing to D-Day. They should acknowledge that China has a much larger superiority over Taiwan than the allies had over Germany.
I’m well aware of what missiles can…and can’t…do. I’m not sure you really understand the numbers we are talking here. China has…that are known…something on the order of 5000+ missiles that can hit Taiwan as well as Guam. Now, how accurate they are, and how reliable they are…THAT is a good question. From what I’ve read, they can hit, say, an air base from that sort of range. Even if only 10 percent hit something, you are still talking well over 500 missiles. There is, simply, no way Taiwan can defend against that. None of their air bases are out of range. Even if the Chinese only damage the runways, it’s going to hinder Taiwan’s ability to get it’s air defense up and operating.
Then there is the disparity in air frames. Taiwan has, IIRC, something like 400 fighters. These range from really old crap to semi-modern but tier 2 or tier 3 F-16s…and I’ll let you guess where most of the numbers are. Taiwan also has it’s own air defense missiles, of course, then there are the fleet assets. But while I think Taiwan’s training is far superior to what the PLAAF or PLAN has, you are talking about nearly an order of magnitude difference in air frames. Of course, a lot of those numbers on the PLAAF side are old Soviet knock off crap, and even their modern fighters have some serious limitations wrt logistics and support, it’s still a massive difference to try and overcome.
Basically, IMHO how this would play out (assuming no US intervention) is…waves of missiles targeted at Taiwanese installations, along with waves of strike air craft. Attempts to isolate and eliminate Taiwan’s naval units by forcing them to have to come out to defend. Once the defenses in Taiwan are suppressed to a significant level, and the Chinese PLAN has been able to either draw out the Taiwanese navy or push it back, and once beach defenses are softened up, China attempts a landing via naval units along with airborne strikes that they constantly practice. Losses are huge on both sides, but the Chinese particularly get hammered. But the numbers are just too overwhelming, unless Taiwan can, somehow, take out the actual invasion ships and logistic support. THAT, IMHO, is the one key flaw or weakness in the Chinese (well, ok…they have a lot of others). They just don’t have that much sea lift capability, and logistics are going to rely heavily on commercial shipping commandeered for this. If the Taiwanese could take out enough of those then they would have a chance to hold onto the island, even if most of their air force and navy are gone.
No, missiles aren’t magic. But a lot of missiles that are at those sorts of ranges and the fairly small number of strategic or even tactical targets China would be shooting at would mean they would get hits…a lot of them. Guan would be in a similar straight. IMHO and all that. My own thinking on this has changed over time. A few years ago I would have said no way could China take Taiwan even without the US, but today? China has focused a hell of a lot of it’s very large military budget on missiles and other perceived gaps that allow them to either fill in what they would really need to take Taiwan or to be able to reasonably fight the US, which is probably their primary goal at this point. They have built a frightening number of these missiles, and deployed them all along their north eastern coast…pointed right at Taiwan but also at any US threat. And they have pushed out the first island chain in the south with their South China Seas ‘island’ building campaign and militarization/fortification.
China is, by no means, 8 feet tall with curly blonde hair (translation…they aren’t invincible), but they aren’t the hollow military they were even 10 years ago. They have invested hundreds of billions in trying to bring their military up to something that COULD fight the US…or at least that they thing could. And I think that, today, their OOB, while not optimal, could take Taiwan (if they were willing to pay a VERY high price) if the US wasn’t involved and was out of the picture.
There is a video series on YouTube that I like to watch that does these sorts of hypothetical wars, and they actually have a multi-part one on this specifically. They agree with my own assessment. Not that this is that meaningful, but just an interesting point.
It would be more advantageous for China to use non-military means to destabilize Taiwan - similar to what Russia has managed to do in some of its former republicans and sphere of influence.
The figure, IIRC, is somewhere in the range of 3,000 Chinese conventional missiles - roughly 2,200 ballistic, a few hundred cruise, a few hundred aircraft-launched. Taiwanese missile shield defenses (Patriot PAC-3 and Tien Kung III) would be lucky to knock out even just a few hundred of those, as you point out, so Taiwan has focused more of late on its own offensive missiles (knock out China’s missiles on the ground rather than in the air, so the thinking goes) and more on hardening - building mountain cavern/underground air bases, investing in rapid runway kits, speedy repair of runways etc. The two mountain cavern airbases at Jiashan and Chihang are reportedly built to house up to 250 Taiwanese fighters, and would be impervious to ballistic missile attack due to the steep angle of the mountains. (Military fiction author Dale Brown wrote extensively about these bases in the 1990s in his novel Fatal Terrain.)
The Taiwanese air OOB (if we ignore the fifty defunct and obsolete F-5 Tigers) consists of roughly 330 F-16s, IDFs and Mirage 2000s. (The new batch of 66 fighters that Trump sold to Taiwan last year won’t arrive until 2023-2026.) They could be limited to hiding out on the east coast and using Taiwan’s central mountain range as cover to duck under because Chinese S-300/-400/Hongqi SAMs are known to have a range that extends over part of Taiwan itself (although Taiwanese SAMs like TK-2 return the favor likewise.) But yes, the Taiwanese air force would be limited in how much it could hide among friendly SAM coverage in light of the 2,000 modern + legacy warplanes + drones that China could hurl at it, although the Chinese warplanes might not have much fuel to loiter or do things once across the Strait.
The most pressing issue is the lack of air-to-air missiles (AAMs). Taiwan, for whatever reason of neglect, has only bought a few hundred AAMs for its large F-16 fleet, while buying over 1,400 AAMs for its much smaller Mirage fleet. If this deficiency continues unaddressed, Taiwan could see its F-16s conceivably run entirely out of missiles on the very first day of war.
AIUI, Russia was able to pull this off because Crimea and Eastern Ukraine had a significant number of pro-Russian rebels who were willing to fight to destabilize Ukraine itself so Russia could annex their territory. While there are some pro-China people in Taiwan, they are nowhere fanatical enough to take up arms against the Taiwanese government in the same way rebels in Donbass did.
The lone exception might be the offshore islands of Jinmen and Matsu, located just miles off of China, which have an overwhelmingly blue (pro-unification) populace, but that would be it.
This is akin to trump being the president, the head of the military and the titular head of the republican party, and by extension the US is a republican government. Make sense?
And I don’t think I have to point out that the views and actions of a government is not necessarily indicative of the people.
The number one slogan in China since the revolution is “For the Service of the People” (为了人民服务). As far as I am aware, there has never been a Maoist or other leading slogan that the Party is the people, the military or the government. Certainly there is the expression: If there was no communist party, there would be no new China (没有共产党，就没有新中国). But that highlights the party’s *leading *role, and *not *that the party is synonymous with the people, the government nor the military.
The Chinese Communist Party has approximately 90 million members. I can’t find the number of people that work in the Chinese government, but it is an order of magnitude larger. And of course the population of china is something around 1.4 billion, so less than 5% are card carrying commies.
While I’ve always know it as CCP (circa 1980), I think that was a butchering of the official translationCommunist Party of China if you believe Wiki. Regardless, it’s a loaded term when one on a board fighting ignorance could use a neutral term such as the Chinese Government.
I guess I should feel blessed since no one on the boards is using “Chicom” or the language of my WW2 and Korean War veteran father.
Take it to the extreme. China could just nuke Taiwan. Extreme yes, but this has been an option for decades. (And I will posit again my personal conspiracy theory that Taiwan has at least a couple of nukes and and MAD strategy.)
Again, Taiwan has economically joined the Borg, it’s just a matter of time before the increasing economic unification drives politics to catch up. Why invade with all the fallout (I slay me) that goes with it? Play the long game, which China has been doing for decades if not centuries.
Look back to WWI. At the Battle of the Somme British artillery fired 1.5 million shells in four days. 375,000 shells per day. Nearly 16,000 per hour. 260 per minute…for four days. What happened when they went in? The Germans were still there and beat them up.
You can see this happen over and over again in WWI and WWII. In WWI it got to crazy levels…surely they erased everything from existence in that area…nope. Happened many times and somehow those artillery barrages never did the job. Artillery barrages that were so intense you can, literally, see their effects to this day, over 100 years later.
You’ve got a whole 5000 missiles? Big whoop. Peanuts and nowhere near enough.
Yeah, they are gonna hurt. But 99+% of the Taiwanese will still be there waiting on the beaches.
This was what people said in 2008, when Beijing-friendly Ma Ying-Jeou got elected - economic ties would unify Taiwan with China. It didn’t work. Despite signing ECFA and having a temporarily hot economy, it led to immense backlash. Ma’s administration tried to ram through another, more-problematic pact with China in 2014, the Sunflower Movement students barricaded against it, the KMT got dealt massive defeats in 2016 and 2020. Now Taiwanese companies are investing another $23 billion at home, many are gradually pulling out of China to some extent and returning home, China tried to punish Taiwan by no longer sending tourists but the Tsai administration successfully overcame that by drawing in an even larger number of non-Chinese tourists. And Tsai’s Southbound Policy is now pushing Taiwan’s economic focus away from China and towards the ASEAN nations.
The 2008-2016 approach of integrating Taiwan’s economy with China’s propelled Taiwan more towards independence and against unification.
I realize it can be a fine point in nations like the People’s Republic of China and the old Soviet Union, where the authority of the national government and the communist party are intertwined. Many leading figures hold positions in both the government and in the party.
But let’s say that China had an outbreak of democracy and allowed other parties to put forth candidates for office and the national government ended up under the control of somebody who wasn’t a member of the Chinese Communist Party. That hypothetical President would have to deal with the fact that the troops in his country don’t take orders from him; they work for the General Secretary of the CCP.
