Beat me to it. The Chinese are going to encounter a lot of Command and Control problems when the shit hits the fan if they ever get into real action against an opposing force of considerable size.
I don’t think Taiwan would stand a chance alone if China was dead set on invading. I doubt China wants to destroy Taiwan just to possess it, and Taiwan won’t be alone, so it’s not really something to consider.
Excellent post. China’s military is powerful but their navy is too weak to enable them to project that power very far. They don’t have a single functioning modern aircraft carrier. For comparison, Italy has two. The Chinese do plenty of their own R&D but they still use many Russian designed systems.
Yes, but she was certainly in power during the negotiations for the handover, which actually took place some years before the actual handover.
Correct. The agreement was negotiated on her watch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration
Some earlier threads that may be of interest:
Almost every thing in this post is wrong. China lacks the navy to successfully transport significant numbers of men and materials to Taiwan.
You mean Tibet, not Nepal, but I see you were already corrected about that.
I’ve never seen anything about China having the best missile program in the world. Have any cites?
China has been successfully invaded a number of times. The Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion went just fine for the invaders, and Japan was definitely getting the better of the Sino-Japanese wars until they eventually turned into World War II.
The last major non-domestic action the Chinese military participated in was the Sino-Vietnamese War. A bloody 3 week long affair, it ended with the Chinese claiming victory while at the same time withdrawing from Vietnamese territory and failing to achieve their strategic goal for going to war in the first place. Which does sound a bit familiar for some reason…
As a regional military power, their military is powerful enough for what they need it for…basically, internal security. It’s not a military that is oriented to projection of power, however. The assertion that China could put two divisions into Taiwan any time they want is ridiculous…two divisions wouldn’t be enough to do dick, and they couldn’t project even that much combat force over the straights. They simply don’t have the navy, the logistics or lift capability to project that sort of force (AND support it) into the teeth of what they would be facing in attempting a forced entry assault on Taiwan, even leaving aside the US.
Defensively or internal security wise they would be a hard, even impossible nut to crack. They have a huge standing army, and their reserves are even larger, and at a guess most of their population, while unhappy with the current government, would rally if attacked. As for offensively, their military just isn’t oriented that way. They don’t have the large logistics capability to support projection of force beyond their borders, even to countries with immediate borders. I doubt they could project more than a few light divisions any sort of distance from their own internal logistics, and any enemy that could strike into China could disrupt those logistics by simply attacking their rail network, which constitutes a good percentage of their logistics.
They are currently building (IIRC) 3 home grown carriers, and they have one Russian retread carrier that is sort of in service. It’s really a test bed to develop their own carrier force. The thing is, having carriers does not mean you can do carrier operations effectively, nor does that mean you can support those carriers (and the battle groups that have to go with them). It’s going to take them years, probably decades to really build up the capability, and basically I think it will be like the Russians…more a token force than any sort of real power. Guess we shall see, but it’s going to cost them a mint to build this capability from basically scratch, and no matter how rich they are (relatively) it’s going to be painful to really build it up to even the point where the Indian’s are today.
They don’t have that ability, no. They don’t have the support and logistics structure to deploy even a heavy division outside of China for any length of time, and they certainly don’t have the ability to do so in the teeth of what they would be facing if they tried to invade Taiwan. They could nuke Taiwan, obviously, but no way could they invade with any hope of success, again even leaving aside US involvement.
The US makes this stuff look easy, but consider what it cost us to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. It took months to put it in place (and we HAVE all the support and logistics elements) and cost us the world to do it. China (nor any other nation) could not do it. Not today anyway. If China really wanted too, I suppose they could spend their $100 billion per year on building the capability, but they generally spend it on things like new main guns for their MBTs and the like. Those things are necessary, no doubt, they they don’t allow you to project force across distance.
I’d say, rather, that they get most of their military technology from straight line progression on earlier Russian (and Chinese partnered) designs. Possibly much of their current stealth orientation came from early US designs that they, um, acquired, but again I think that they took that as a starting point and then it was a straight line progression (or, I guess, evolution) of design from there.
Is the US as committed to assist Taiwan as it is for South Korea, or Israel? If, in some nightmare, China went after Taiwan, what would the US do? (I know it’s more than unlikely to ever happen).
ETA: Several people in this thread have taken it as a given the US would come to Taiwan’s aid. Is that really guaranteed? By treaty?
Yeah, we have a treaty (mutual defense treaty, called something like Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty…something like that). If China attacks Taiwan we’d be obligated to come to their defense. I seriously doubt we’d fail to honor our treaty obligations if China attacked Taiwan.
According to Wiki, that treaty was abrogated in 1980. Is anything now in force?
Er, nevermind. Current law/treaty doesn’t call for us to intervene at all.
“The Taiwan Relations Act does not require the U.S. to intervene militarily if the PRC attacks or invades Taiwan, and the U.S. has adopted a policy of “strategic ambiguity” in which the U.S. neither confirms nor denies that it would intervene in such a scenario.”
Yeah, I guess they were folded into the Taiwan Relations Act. I don’t see a mutual defense provision, so maybe we aren’t obligated by treaty to defend Taiwan anymore. This is the only part that vaguely talks about defense:
ETA: At a guess, we’d still respond to any aggression towards Taiwan by China with the use of military force, however. IIRC, we still keep a carrier group in the area pretty much for this reason.
The point is, if China went all North Korea on the USA and simply decided it was going to take Taiwan, and any interference would be met with nuclear retaliation (either against th US fleet, or if that didn’t work, selected US cities) then odds are the USA woul decide not to get too involved.
We like t think we woul notice preparations for an sudden invasion, but the same would be said about Saddam and Kuwait, I’m sure.
OTOH, never underestimate economic levers. If suddenly the west decided come hell or high water they declined to import anything from China (or sell it food), think how much busier those troops would be trying to contain, or at least feed, the billion unemployed Chinese. The world is a lot more complicated that a video wargame. Everyone has something to lose.
The trick is not to push anyone into such a tight corner that they have no choice.
If the USA and China go to war, even a limited war over Taiwan, it will crash the economies of both nations. We’re too interdependent. We import too much from them and too much of their economy is dependent on those exports to us.
Most definitely not. For all our talk about freedom and democracy, it’s pretty clear right now that Red China is here to stay and is much more important to us than Taiwan will ever be. I’m sure we are kicking ourselves right now wishing we had never made this such a big deal. If our reputation wasn’t at stake, I’m sure we’d be fine with a Hong Kong style handover.
Our official stance is “strategic ambiguity,” where we hope that the threat that we *might[/i[ intervene acts as a deterrent. But if the chips were down, it’s hard to tell what we’d do-- it’d really depend on whatever wild circumstances in China prompted the invasion, and what we felt about the integrity of the Chinese state at that time.
Apart from the point previously made that Thatcher wasn’t PM at the time.
The Poms have known for most of the 99 year lease how tenuous was they hold on the territory.
China never had to threaten military intervention, they held all the legal cards and could up the ante in the blink of an eye … since 1960 Hong Kong imports over 70% of it’s water from China through the Dongjiang - Shenzhen Water Supply Scheme. Why take 48 hours and risk any loss of life when they could turn off the tap in a couple of minutes? It should also be pointed out that PRC has never exercised the “water weapon” in its relationship with Hong Kong.
Now there’s a man who knows 'is onions. Spot on.
Except that as with Hong Kong there will be no necessity to threaten military intervention. The Chinese will (eventually, this century, maybe next one) get the US to hand back Taiwan as relief of the crushing burden of debt the US is so rapidly accumulating.
On the other hand, there is sound eco-political sense in banging the war drum periodically, not being to accommodating over the DPRK question etc. All keeps the US on high and expensive military alert. It’s the same geopolitical game that the US won over the USSR in the Cold War match race between economic and military models. But this time the US has a 17 trillion of lead in it’s saddlebags while the PRC is rolling in cash.
China spends a lot on defense but they’ve fought border wars with India and Russia, major wars with Japan and Korea, and depend on the military to keep their population in line (when will they learn TV and video games are a lot cheaper?). They’re not competing with us but with four of the most powerful nations on the planet. US politicians are trying to brainwash us with the China threat so we’ll keep throwing our money away on crap like the F-35 that can’t outfight an F-16, carrier battle groups that would be destroyed if they came within range of a well defended coast, and the best land army in the world that is too small to win a war in Iraq or Afghanistan and too expensive to maintain even at its current size. China ain’t gonna build a big blue water navy, we’re the only ones who still buy that crap about projecting power. They’d like to build a stealth aircraft but still haven’t learned how to build the advanced military jet engines to put in 'em. Nukes are a good deterrent against invasion, but nobody’s ever going to invade them and their population and industry/agriculture are so concentrated along their coast that one Trident type submarine would be enough to MIRV them back to the stone age. It’ll be interesting to see if they manage the transition from a slave labor economy to a truly productive middle class based sort of capitalism, but I think they’re just as likely to slip back into the same pathetic chaotic and vastly corrupt sort of wheel spinning snake eatin it’s own tail situation Mexico has fallen into. Col. Hackworth said when the Chinese hordes poured across the Yalu River and kicked the American Army’s ass almost all the way out of Korea a lot of their soldiers didn’t have anything to fight with but homemade spears. Now that’s a war story…
That’s a nice theory. Except that China owns less than $2T of that debt. Further, it’s a debt that we can always repudiate (the economic nuclear option). At that point, China has dick except worthless paper (really computer bits). Further, further, at that point so much of China will be unemployed that the military won’t have time to worry about Taiwan, they’ll be too busy dealing with a couple of thousand Tiananmen Squares.
It’s the classic no-win. For either side, victory will cost more than they are willing to play. To quote War Games, “the only winning move is not to play.”
Oh man you should take a look at that website, there’s some gold there.
Let’s put gun turrets on the F35. No Aerodynamic problems there.
My favourite bit is when he suggests putting an infra-red tracker on the rear gun turret. After all there’s no incredibly bright heat source at the back of planes.
Then there’s this revolution in air combat.
No spoilers! Read it for yourself.
You have surely not bought into that nonsense have you?:rolleyes:
… and not wanting to derail the thread, but i just had to share this one.
Behold! The awsome defensive powers of a rain canopy with curtains.
http://www.g2mil.com/tankroofs.htm
Bonus points, keeps the tank commanders hair dry when it’s raining.