Is The Taiwan War Happening?
Dementia Biden can't answer
ZeroHedge reports that consulting firms are asking the US government if there is going to be a war in Taiwan. As The Daily Beagle observes, there’s clear signs Biden has dementia, and thus isn’t fit to answer this question. So we will.
Yes
Okay, you can leave now. No clickbait.
Wait, But Why?
I imagine you knew it deep down too and wanted confirmation. We can assess why the Taiwan war is definitely going to happen by drawing parallels to what sparked reactions by other countries in WW2. In this case, Japan.
As most people know, Japan attacked America as a result of America embargoing oil supplies, which crippled the Japanese military's ability to mobilise. It’s not entirely clear what Japan were hoping to achieve by attacking America, because it would have still meant the oil embargo remained. However it teaches us something.
Countries in economic dire straits, can and will do stupidly illogical things out of complete desperation, including going to war with a superior opponent. America has the oil, defeat America, get the oil. Easy, duh. Except, obviously, it wasn’t. And then they got nuked.
China finds itself in a similar situation, but it isn’t over oil this time…
China’s Economic Crisis
In the article The Coming Chinese Collapse, The Daily Beagle noted that China’s debt has exceeded the 50% marker of their GDP, coupled with Evergrande’s real estate collapse, absurd lockdown policies, a bank run and a mortgage payment refusal protest, their finances are circling the toilet (although this isn’t unique to China).
China’s population is quite large, at time of writing 1.4 billion, however this is a top heavy population of mostly elderly due to insane depopulation agenda tactics removing the young, as noted in The Daily Beagle article Refuting the 'Overpopulation Crisis'. As a result, there are, ironically, not enough workers to sustain China’s economy - and this includes agriculture.
Xi Jinping, the corrupt leader of the CCP, announced a “clean your plate” initiative, along with a “Food Appreciation act” which was China’s hamfisted way of trying to fight a war on ‘food waste’ in a flimsy attempt to reduce food losses. This was ironic and hypocritical given the CCP’s members were…
notorious for hosting lavish banquets with more dishes than guests could possibly eat
As noted in the Newsweek opinion piece by Gordan G Chang in 2021, China fell back on their self-sustainability targets for food, quoting:
[…] 2020, an especially difficult year for Chinese agriculture. Floods in the country's south, drought in the north, typhoons in the northeast and pest infestations in the southwest took their tolls. Disease continued to spread among animals across China.
The disease Chang is referring to is Swine Flu. As CounterPunch observed in 2019, China had just under half of the world’s pigs:
The pork industry is worth about $128 billion in China and the country’s 375 million pigs make up just under half the planet’s total.
China is also pretty ruthless on their campaign against Swine Flu:
If a single pig is found to test positive for the virus, the entire herd has to be slaughtered. Farmers usually suffer substantial financial losses in the process.
Given the noticeable inaccuracies of PCR tests, with courts agreeing as much, this had alarming implications for China.
Many an unqualified news outlet with zero medical qualifications citing other unqualified news outlets with zero medical qualifications twisting interpretation will disagree, but their opinions are worthless - medical communities and legal court opinion alike see PCR tests as unreliable.
As a result, this means China is likely slaughtering a great many pigs unnecessarily. If the disease is fatal and they’re going to slaughter them, what’s the difference? One wonders why quarantine measures on animals isn’t used.
Hoarding Food An Indicator Of War
China went on the offensive and, prior to the war in Ukraine, started to hoard about 50% of the world’s entire grain supply. They’re not using the grain for anything, simply hoarding it.
Now, given China has largely not been involved in the Ukraine war, it begs the question, why they were pre-emptively hoarding grain - given Ukraine were a large grain exporter - before it even started?
Of course, you could say they were privy to details in the lead up to the Ukraine war, but that implies strategic planning. And sure, taking defensive measures against a loss isn’t typically an indicator, but the sheer amount of grain China has opted to hoard - half of the world’s supply (China only has roughly 1/7th the world’s population) - suggests they anticipate spill over on a large scale.
After all, China can also import from other countries, right? Well, not if they anticipate a global war. You could be forgiven if you thought the Chinese anticipated a global war involving Ukraine, but the fact of the matter is, China clearly anticipates a global war involving themselves, because why would they expect grain deliveries to China to dry up unless they anticipated their own involvement in a war and also getting embargoed like Japan was in WW2?
The Spat With India
China isn’t just running out of food, though, it is also running out of water. As Bloomberg noted in late 2021, it is a situation entirely of their own making:
China possesses 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. Entire regions, especially in the north, suffer from water scarcity worse than that found in a parched Middle East.
Emphasis added:
Thousands of rivers have disappeared, while industrialization and pollution have spoiled much of the water that remains. By some estimates, 80% to 90% of China’s groundwater and half of its river water is too dirty to drink; more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water cannot even be used for industry or farming.
A dire predicament indeed. So, does China propose policy reforms, ways to clean up groundwater, improvements in their environmental policies? Err, no. They want to try to steal more water from India.
China’s plan to dam the Yarlung Zangbao, the world’s highest river, threatens to spark conflict with downstream India
This wasn’t the only move they did to steal more land from India, they also diverted the Galwan river so they could claim more of India’s territory. This is not normal behaviour between two states that aren’t supposed to be at war, and China’s moves here are clearly aggressive. Water to China is like oil to America.
Other nations might have been more diplomatic and traded for the resources they needed, or hammered out a diplomatic understanding, shared what was available, offered to buy or pay for the resources, offered goods and services in exchange for the water etc. But not China.
This adds another part of the puzzle piece: if China lacks something, they have no qualms using force and violence to seize what they lack. In-fact, the evidence shows this is their preferred first choice, even when better options exist. In-fact, in 2020 they violated Ecuador’s sovereign territory in the ocean around the Galápagos islands and mass-fished the region.
Ukraine Offers No Real Benefit To China
We’ve established they’re short of key resources - food and water - and we’ve shown they’re ever eager to use force and violence, even outright ignoring sovereignty, but we haven’t established the where.
The reason China aren’t going to get involved in the Ukraine war (besides not explicitly condemning or supporting it), is because geo-strategically, it doesn’t offer any practical resources to China. Sure, it exports grain, but China only really wants food, which they can hypothetically get from other countries.
Ukraine is technically speaking on Russia’s doorstep, and isn’t located anywhere near China. China attacks India because it shares a border with it. China fishes at Ecuador because it shares an ocean with it. There’s no direct or indirect line-of-sight China shares with Ukraine.
Geopolitically, trying to interfere with Ukraine for China is lose-lose, as either they piss off the Russians, or they piss off the US and Europe, and there’s no resources to get out of it. So naturally, Ukraine is not going to drag China into a war.
What would?
Taiwan
It fulfills most, if not all of the criterion for Chinese expansionism. It is next door to China, accessible by sea; China has a motive for wanting it, seeing it as previously Chinese; it offers a geo-strategic advantage against their enemies like South Korea and Japan as a forward landing base/forward warning base, and it offers them an ocean-based access point for trade.
Certainly it doesn’t offer overwhelming water or food opportunities, which explains why China hasn’t taken it yet, it is Hong Kong-esque in it is a part of land China wants to ‘reclaim’ as their own, and just like China’s forceful annexation of Hong Kong, it is likely they will want to do the same with Taiwan.
Taiwan being an island so close to China is strategically hard to defend against China. It can be encircled, bombed, isolated, bombarded by navy, struck from the air, hit with missiles and very long range artillery. Presenting a smaller target cross-section than China itself, Taiwan also is easier for China to focus on, where-as Taiwan has very few options in which to meaningfully defend itself.
This makes Taiwan a juicy target to attack for China. So the final question is…
When?
The Daily Beagle estimates that China will attack in the fall. Your question is likely to be ‘why the fall?’. Currently the West is extremely weak from the events of the Ukraine war. The Death of the EU looms, Germany runs low on weapons from reserves, and the US is panicking about how it might not be able to replenish weapons fast enough.
China is likely waiting for as much damage to be inflicted as possible by Russia first, before they opt to attack. This allows China to build more warships and increase their army without having to incur any losses. It won’t be until the fall that the EU and US take their predicaments seriously. As soon as China senses a U-turn in EU-US strength to where it begins growing again, it will likely begin attacking, because this crippling blow to both the US and EU is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and strategically they’d be insane not to take it up.
But…
…it is likely they’d lose the war, right? The Xi Jinping regime has not shown itself capable of rational thought when it comes to aggression. Their warring with India is illogical. Trying to provoke other non-hostile Asian countries is illogical. Risking a war with a nuclear power over an island is illogical. And yet they make illogical decisions all day long.
It is worth not making a mindset fallacy and assuming someone thinks like you do. Lots of people make illogical decisions daily. China invading Taiwan in the fall is one of them.
If you like my work, be sure to support it by sharing the article link with other people, subscribing or even becoming a supporter. Thank you!
Want to express your views?
Want to stay up-to-date?
Want to let others know what is happening?
Only one critique of the article. You wrote "China has a motive for wanting it, seeing it as previously Chinese". Actually mainland China belonged to the current government in Taiwan (Chang Kai-Shek ring a bell?) until they became a government in exile run off the mainland by the Chinese communists. Otherwise, great essay.