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by CogitoCogito 1993 days ago
I don't entirely trust Biden when it comes to this, however, you can't really compare Taiwan to Hong Kong. To take Taiwan, China needs to annex an entirely separate country. They can do that through soft influence (pretty sure everyone agrees that's totally a failure), through economic means (Taiwan has been diversifying it's economy so not sure how great that option is anymore), or militarily. Even if other countries were to stay out of it, it would extremely risky for China. They very well could fail. Comparing Taiwan to Hong Kong in this instance really is kind of ludicrous.
1 comments

It may be risky for China, but if you actually read Chinese media (or even the halfway house that is the SCMP), you can see to them it's not a question of IF but WHEN...

https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/a...

I know and it's scary. That doesn't mean an attack will actually happen though. And even if it does happen, that doesn't mean it'll succeed.
What downside does China have? Nobody will stand up and do anything to stop them.
What downsides? Even ignoring the economic and political fallout (which could leave them entirely isolated on the world stage), they could _fail_ in their attempted invasion even if only going head to head with Taiwan. The result after both a successful and an unsuccessful invasion could very well be a collapse of the PRC. They certainly understand this. That's way they've simply used the threats as a tool of internal propaganda. They may one day go for it, but it is very far from risk-free.