What hardware are they building tho

The Chinese have two carriers. One of them used to be Soviet. Soviet carriers are a fucking joke. The Chinese actually bought two but one of them was so clapped out that they turned it into a theme park. The British have two aircraft carriers. The United States has eleven air craft carriers.

The Chinese have a fuckton of ferries. The plan, ostensibly, is to load up a bunch of tanks'n'shit and then spend an hour under sail while the Taiwanese do fuckall, apparently. It's one thing to step under a guard post and drive towards Kyiv. It's quite another to attempt the capture of a deep-water island 50 nautical miles offshore.

The Chinese have a bunch of jets. They have zero experience dog fighting. They have zero experience with ground suppression. They have zero experience with any sort of combat. The last (and first!) air-to-air combat kill by the Chinese was accidental. They tried in 1959 but got handed their ass by - wait for it - Taiwan.

The Chinese have a giant conscript military. Who throw rocks at India. You wanna see the last military engagement China threw down on? They got their asses handed to them by Vietnam. Like... six years after the Americans left.

Now - Donald Trump could maybe be talked into walking away from Taiwan. I could see that. But against any real opposition?

There's this idea that big government make-work projects are effective in battle just because they're covered in guns. We were quaking in our boots against the Soviets because they had so much fuckin' hardware. The fact of the matter is, the Russians have never not had a bigger army, navy or air force than us and they're over there feeding conscripts to drones at a thousand casualties a day. North Korea has a bigger navy than the USA and you're just now finding that out.

"Taiwan is Chinese" is a big pillar of Chinese domestic politics. "Our adversaries are always scary and overwhelming" is a big pillar of American domestic politics. I could be wrong on this! They might have been building NATO II over there for the past 20 years. But if so, no one is buying their shit. By the numbers, China is the "fourth largest exporter of military arms in the world." But that puts them behind the USA (43%), France (11%) and the UK (11%) with a whopping 6% of the international arms trade. Two thirds of that goes to Pakistan, by the way. The other third, effectively, goes to Myanmar and Bangladesh.

We built up this whole mythology about how yeah, the export-grade shit the Soviets were slinging all over the world was hot garbage, but that's because they were keeping their truly impressive stuff at home! Fast-forward to any actual conflict between Russian and American hardware and training and it is a knife through butter. And yes, I know we're talking about the Taiwanese. If the US and NATO decided to drop Taiwanese protection the Chinese would probably go for it.

But it would be a clusterfuck.