[FrontierPsych]

As Flatcircle states, China has a serious demographics problem, as does Russia. Extremely serious.

A huge number of women have just hit 40-years-old, so they can not longer have children. The one-child policy means there are hardly any children, AND female children were aborted to have a male child, so there is something like 125 males for every female, which exacerbates the problem.

China is far from the cheapest place to manufacture anymore and companies are flyuing out of China because of that and belligerence and supply chains and opaque laws, mandatory technical transfer, and so much more. All this is making land and housing expensive, and poor paying jobs so that they young cannot afford stuff, which is why "laying flat" is such a big deal there now. Why work hard for nothing, no chance of making it?

Same with Russia, for a long time, and this war has killed how many young Russian men in the prime of their life, and also to flee the country, most likely permanently in many cases as they find jobs and settle down in new countries.

Russia and China are in serious trouble demographically. This is why Russia attacked Ukraine, in my opinion. They will even have less manpower in 10 years. And I think this is going to drive China to attack Taiwan - they just won't have the manpower in 10 years, not like they have now...even with 1 billion people.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Depends. I could imagine wild reaction of Chinese families being essentially wiped out when their only sons will die in trying to to storm few but heavily fortified beaches of Taiwan. Could be recipe for another collapse of China.

[abdabab]

> They will even have less manpower in 10 years. And I think this is going to drive China to attack Taiwan

What would China gain by attacking Taiwan though? They only have 24 million people.

[FrontierPsych]

Because Taiwan is the single most important producer of semiconductors in the world, is the most important reason. If China gains that, they gain the world. Everything is dependant on that. They would have a chokehold on the world.

Also, Taiwan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_aircraft_carrier

It can be used as a staging location for an attack on China, same as Cuba could be for Russia. Look what the USA did there.

[rnk]

I see the main reason is that it's a core tenant to Xi's current CCP that there will be one China and they want to destroy them. The existence of a Chinese democracy is intolerable to them. It certainly goes against the stated vision that the communist China state will be the most powerful country in the world, lead all the Chinese people, etc. Just like Honk Kong was an intolerable example of (basically) free and democratic thinking.