[MR4D]

China is working on taking Hong Kong first, before moving onto Taiwan.

I give it between 1-5 years before they move in some way on Taiwan.

One thing I would not bet on is a direct military incursion - that would cause too many foreign headaches. Something messy that's hard to pull apart is better. The current events with social unrest in HK are a good example of creating ambiguity.

The one interesting thing to me is that China normally has a very long time horizon, but now they don't. Trump has effectively made sure that Cold War 2.0 has started, and China is the enemy. The problem for the Chinese in this situation is that a substantial amount of manufacturing will move out of China, weakening their economy. And a weak economy is usually not a good thing for leadership.

[magicsmoke]

There's a pretty interesting part about how Chinese media describes the causes of the unrest in Hong Kong that gives a window into how they think about the world and human nature. That is, the point about how Hong Kong's unrest is due to its education system that gets raised.

Right now, 1 country 2 systems means that PRC can't just dismantle HK's education system and institute their own until 2047. But the comments HK's education system indicate that the PRC thinks if they could just put HK's children through a state-approved education system, in 1-2 generations all the unrest in HK would be over. This is a worldview that people are ultimately malleable, or at least their children are, and that with the right childhood education you can get people to believe anything. Brainwashing, after all, is originally a word from Chinese that became an English loanword. In this worldview, everyone who's gone through schooling is brainwashed in some way to support the state that created the education system. And this worldview applies to any state-sponsored education system in the world. Take a Chinese immigrant family in America, put their 2nd gen kids through the American education system, by the 3rd gen you have Americans that can't imagine themselves as anything other than Americans.

This worldview that people can be molded is probably why China is in no rush to exercise full control over HK and Taiwan. After all, if people's national identities are so easily changed, any discontent in HK and Taiwan today can be brainwashed away in few generations. It's far more important to focus on the physical and economic levers that would allow China to exercise long-term control over those regions than social levers that determine whether people in those regions actually like the prospect. If they don't like it, their children will.