[nradov]

No one expects China to actually invade Midway or Hawaii. However, they do want to secure their sea lines of communication including Taiwan, the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands, and the Malacca Strait. Due to lack of natural resources and overpopulation they depend on imports of food, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and iron ore just to survive. Hypothetically if they were to invade Taiwan they might take the risk of conducting long-range strikes against US bases in the theater in order to degrade our ability to respond.

Japan in 1941 had no chance to succeed long term by focusing on a land war in China because they were being cut off from access to crucial raw materials. To be clear I am not justifying their aggressive and genocidal military actions. Just pointing out that from that perspective their attacks on Midway and Hawaii made a certain amount of strategic sense and had at least a small chance of working.

[paganel]

> fertilizer

They can get that via rail from Russia and Kazahstan with almost no issue, even from Belarus if Kazahstan says no. Yes, it will add some extra-costs but nothing that won't be financially manageable.

> fossil fuels

Basically just oil, which it will be very easy for them to replace in case of a war against the US by telling their (China's citizens) not to drive petrol cars anymore. Mission accomplished. It also helps that China is leading the EV industry and that it has a very extensive and intensive railway network in place, so if there is one big country that could make do without personal cars that would be China.

> iron ore

Russia to the rescue again, for example the largest world deposit of iron ore is located in Siberia [1]. Also, most probably the Chinese authorities will put all new civil construction on hold until the blockade/war would be over and they'll redirect all that iron ore to the military industry (for making artillery shells, tanks, stuff like that). Not to mention the fact that by that point Australia (a major US ally) would have already become close to broke (as their economy depends on selling to China lots of stuff taken from the ground).

> imports of food

I've read some piece in the Economist a couple of months ago where they were mentioning how come China has food reserves for at least 2 or 3 years, but, ignoring that, Russia will come to the rescue again (thanks to their chernozom).

As per Japan in WW2, they could have lived off the land (i.e. off China) had they really got in and conquer it all. They had been already doing a similar thing in Korea for three or four decades by that point, so they had practice. The imported oil was basically needed for their Navy, so with no new Navy big campaigns in the works that wouldn't have been necessary.

[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/554788

[nradov]

You don't have a realistic understanding of the situation. Rail links are limited, and don't have the same capacity as ships. China has been trying to address that through the "Belt and Road" initiative but with limited progress so far.

It's not so much the fertilizer itself that China needs to import, but rather the natural gas needed to manufacture fertilizer. Beyond natural gas, China is also a huge importer of coal for power, heating, and steelmaking. They have no realistic path to energy independence and will remain dependent on maritime imports for decades at least. Reducing petrol use won't allow them to keep their economy running or feed the populace.

In a crisis, China could perhaps find alternative sources of food imports at very high costs. But that is not a rational approach to long term national survival.

There was never any possibility for the Japanese empire in 1941 to live off the land in the territory they had conquered. They were already being cut off from crucial raw materials including oil and rubber. Without a secure supply of those their situation was simply untenable.

[ngcc_hk]

One of the strange move by china is to go pacific. It is a land empire. Hence if you think through it and given there is actual war between Soviet Union and china, why not point upwards and get back Siberia. Or somehow effectively get that by letting Russia dig shit in Ukraine and get their material cheap.

It is understandable to try to break the pacific ring but fighting a war on the sea … even if it won, can it be sustainable? Is there any material in Pacific Ocean easily obtainable?

For the M strait the pacific rim is really a different ball game. The whole strait is surrounded by countries which will not give up their coastline. The sea and land belt thing is mostly to bypass it?

The whole move is wrong. I have spoken.

[paganel]

> You don't have a realistic understanding of the situation. Rail links are limited,

I do have a realistic understanding of the situation, see for example this article from back in 1973, Le Transsibérien [1], published in the French Revue Défense Nationale. It's basically a French lieutenant-colonel who took the Trans-Siberian Railway and who came back with some lived experience and with some statistics. Back then the Trans-Siberian alone was responsible for 9% of the internal rail traffic from the entire world, I'm pretty sure that 50 years later and with a doubling of the rail connection between European Russian and the Far-East Russia the stats are pretty much the same, if not better.

Like I said, I know that rail is a little more expensive compared to sea transport, but nothing that can't be dealt with given the context of a world war.

> why not point upwards and get back Siberia

Not every big country on this planet has the same natural resources-focused imperialist views like the Western countries have.

Forgot to mention about the Trans-Siberian, supposedly the Soviets built the 2-lane railway bridges at some distance one from the other, meaning one lane from the other lane, so that an aerial bomb attack taking out one of those railway bridges wouldn't have taken out both lanes at the same time. It's small things like that demonstrate the strategic long-term thinking of some societies.

[1] https://www.defnat.com/e-RDN/vue-article.php?carticle=1454&c...

Later edit: Sorry, meant as a reply for the above poster, HN should implement a "Delete" option sooner rather than later...

[nradov]

The geography around most of the China/Russia border sucks. It would be tough to push through a mechanized invasion force even with numerical superiority. They previously fought a few limited border skirmishes with neither side able to make much progress. Even if China somehow managed to take part of Siberia the technical challenges and logistics would limit what they can actually extract. And of course the Russians would nuke Beijing before they surrender part of their core sovereign territory.