[goatsi]

>China is the only country in the world that produces everything it needs for daily operations, without a single exception, in one way or another.

Tell me what I'm missing about their domestic oil industry then, because everything else I'm reading tells me they need to import around 10 million barrels of crude oil a day (primarily to produce gasoline and diesel, so it's very hard to substitute).

[sudosysgen]

Indeed, they do. They still have the domestic capacity to expand internal production to cover most of those 10 million barrels. I didn't say they produce everything they need in sufficient quantities, just that they produce it. It would cause short term trouble and rationing but long term the impact is mitigated.

[goatsi]

Looking at the most recent numbers, they produced just under 4 million barrels a day domestically. Oil production isn't something where you can just triple the output over a few months. China has been working to expand their internal production for a while, and it takes billions of dollars and years to do so: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2019/06/06/china-is-bett...

[sudosysgen]

They don't need to triple it in months. Increasing domestic supply by 50%, increasing Russian oil imports from 1.7 mbd to 3mbd.

Meanwhile, China has reserves for 100 days of imports.

In the long term domestic and Russian production will catch up fully.

[goatsi]

Did you read the article? Why would they plan to spend 77 billion over 5 years for a 50% increase in production if they could crank it out of their existing infrastructure in under 100 days?

And even if Russia repudiated every other contract they have in Asia, it doesn't look like they have the pipeline capacity to get that much oil to China, even if the cross border capacity for China to import it existed. So it would have to come on tankers, which would generate some interesting geopolitical brinkmanship.

That's assuming things don't escalate far beyond sanctions or a possible blockade. The risk with a naval confrontation is that it's very easy to quickly generate casualties that would make backing down politically suicidal. Even just a few of the smaller ships getting sunk means hundreds of dead sailors.

[sudosysgen]

77 billion is the price to do it right over 5 years. If you don't care about quality and are willing to spend more you can do it faster. We have historical examples of this.

The pipeline capacity alone from Russia to China is 1.6mbd. Of that, 600 000bd are used, so there is 1mbd of spare capacity just in that pipeline.

It doesn't really matter if the US can or can't back down. It will be disastrous politically and economically to the US and its allies to a level that can scarcely be imagined. Even then, US naval forces have a serious chance of defeat. China is not a small country you can roll over. They have a very well thought out, multilayered, exceedingly technologically sophisticated A2/AD umbrella that means that millions of square kilometers will be in practice off limits to the US. Beyond those zones, China enjoys extremely prompt hypersonic strike capability that has no real counter, which means that in a hot war any US vessel that gets it's rough location leaked running a blockade or running through a strait risks getting sunk straight up.

It's not a war that the US can win. What are the objectives? Take back Taiwan? Literally impossible. Regime change in China? Forget about it. About the only thing that can be done is to hurt the Chinese economy roughly as much as the US economy, enrage the entire rest of the world and destroy any semblance of goodwill the US has, and trigger a recession followed by a restructuring of the US economy that reduces the place of the US in the value chain.

It's simply a stupid move that has no upside. It doesn't matter how the public acts immediately, eventually the US will have to give up.