[ArkanExplorer]

China's fertility rate (assuming it is accurate) is excellent by the standards of other high-IQ populations, at 1.69.

By contrast, Taiwan is dreadful, at 1.07. Eventually, China will be able to just sail in.

The real threat to our chip supplies is that the world will run out of intelligent Taiwanese people to operate TSMC.

[jjk166]

The thing about demographics is that it doesn't matter what your fertility rate is now, it matters what it was 20 years ago. The fact is that China's largest cohort turns 31 this year, while it's current military age cohorts are half its size, and shrinking. The cohort turning 18 this year is the smallest since the Great Leap Forward. The next cohort with 10 million males is currently 5 years old, and it is an anomalous blip with the most recent cohort being 20% smaller and near future cohorts undoubtedly to be smaller still due to the decreasing size of their parental cohorts.

Your population in their 20s are your soldiers, your baby makers, your first home buyers, your 80 hour a week workers, your pop culture consumers - a sharp drop in their numbers is catastrophic for a nation's geopolitical and economic health. Combined with China's baby boom about to enter their 60s, when their economic productivity will substantially decline and their medical costs will skyrocket, to be supported primarily by weak cohorts 20 years younger it is a terrible position to be in. On top of this, the People's Republic of China is currently 72 years old, for context Russia went 74 years from the abdication of the Tsar to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the average lifetime of China's 49 dynasties has been 70 years. 65 to 75 years is approximately how long the revolution remains in living memory, how long people are still alive who personally remember how bad the previous regime was and thus continue to excuse any faults of the current regime. Once it passes out of living memory, calls for reform become far more intense. This triple whammy is imminent and inescapable.

For China to survive, it will have to deal with a shortage of manpower, a dramatic increase in the cost of social services, severe economic contraction, and the reforging of a national identity all at the same time, with a reduced sized military, a large number of young unmarried males with poor prospects, all while under severe external pressure along all fronts. This will be a rough decade for China.

[seniorivn]

everything you described has been historic reasons to start a war, utilize extra male population(that has a great potential for revolt), give your people patriotic reasons to support your power, affirm control over population, force older generations to work more regardless of their health. And if a war campaign is successful geopolitically it can lead to expansion that will provide your nation with external sources of manpower and economic growth.

For example if China will successfully take over Taiwan, it can use that experience as a leverage in it's colonization of African and Asian countries that it's already actively attempts. China was a provider of important bricks in the world economy growth in the past decades, if CCP manages to put themselves on top of someone elses economic growth the same way, they can manage to afford the very expensive management of demographic collapse and economy transformation.

[jjk166]

It might be a good reason to start a war with a neighbor they can reach by land, but they need a win, not a protracted and costly fight, which is exactly what they'll get attempting a naval invasion.

Taiwan is not a source of manpower and economic growth, the only thing of value is a high tech industry that will be immediately destroyed by any sort of military action. Whatever minor gains could be hasd would be completely overshadowed by the immense cost of fighting the pro-taiwan coalition. China's economy is reliant on ocean going foreign trade, both for the import of raw materials and the export of its manufactured goods, but that trade is totally at the mercy of powers that aren't big fans of China to begin with and would openly oppose it in the case of war. You can't maintain the world's second largest economy running freighters through a blockade in the hopes of selling a fraction of your wares in third world ports.

Saber rattling is often an effective strategy for galvanizing public support, but actually fighting a war typically proves disastrous. Even in the absolute best case scenario where the US and other western countries don't join the conflict, one need only too look at the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or the US in Vietnam to see how a superpower can be humiliated by a grossly inferior opponent and the severe internal strife caused by such boondoggles. Again, amphibious assaults are difficult under the best of circumstances, and Taiwan is an especially difficult target; China's huge advantage in population is useless as you're limited by the number of troops you can land on a beach, and China has zero experience in conducting such operations. The odds of such a war becoming a long and protracted conflict that destroys the Chinese economy and causing mass unrest is incredibly high. The idea that Taiwan is an easy practice target on the road to some second scramble for Africa is simply laughable.