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zombimuncha t1_j07sf3h wrote

So if the west relies less on Taiwan for chips, does that make it easier or harder for China to take over?

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SudoPoke t1_j07y70s wrote

It makes it harder diplomatically. It is and always has been militarily impossible due to geographic advantages. Anyone who says Taiwan is at any risk has no idea.

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-Aerobrake- t1_j07zcup wrote

The chances that China can actually fully take over Taiwan are zero, but the chances that they can make a very stupid and doomed attempt at it and get millions of people on both sides killed before their inevitable defeat are much higher than zero.

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SudoPoke t1_j0809xu wrote

yea agreed, only way china gets Taiwan is through mutual destruction and a city of ashes at the end.

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fettuccine- t1_j07uja3 wrote

both. easier cuz its so close to China but hard because the US has strong presence in the area. also they wouldn't want to risk actually fighting there and destroy the fabs.

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Silversky615 t1_j081eu0 wrote

The distance is irrelevant since it is an island. Russia hasn’t been able to take Ukraine and that’s a country right along their borders.

Trying to stage a D-Day invasion where each landing craft has thousands of soldiers in the age of accurate anti ship missiles is a death sentence.

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TheArmoredKitten t1_j0839e6 wrote

Yeah it's just not physically possible to get the equipment for a conventional ground invasion into Taiwan. They'd have to do some kind of absolutely balls to the wall combined arms assault that perfectly coordinates an airborne invasion behind the beach defenses with the amphibious invasion, but even that would still probably fail gloriously as all those unsupported paratroopers would just be ripped to shreds by inland defenses and never even reach the objective.

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Silversky615 t1_j083yj3 wrote

While a military invasion is unlikely I wonder what the likely hood of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would be. I assume they will keep doing what they are already doing which is try to gain influence in Taiwan politically, but they messed that plan up after what they did to Hong Kong.

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JelloSquirrel t1_j091lqh wrote

China wouldn't invade unless Xi is a true idiot.

China would subvert an election or bribe the military to do a coup supported by their special forces.

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Eedat t1_j0866f7 wrote

They wouldnt dare touch large powers like the US or EU. They went full paper tiger about the Nancy Pelosi visit and the US just didn't care and did it anyway.

Taiwanese opinion on mainland China plummeted after they saw how Hong Kong was treated. Short term influence would be hard to gain

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Pierogi_Master t1_j0875da wrote

Dexter Filkins talked about this on NPR Fresh Air recently. From memory a bit ago but basically as an island lots of things are imported, including the means of energy production. The island could be without power within a week or so of a blockade at the cost of 0 Chinese lives.

Elsewhere in the interview its mentioned that in war games the US simulates in an escalation that the US loses. One official stated we (the US) simply don't have the industrial base to manage a sustained conflict against the Chinese.

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Silversky615 t1_j089cr2 wrote

I feel like these simulations never account for the advantage that absolute technological supremacy has. Similar to how with Russia the West would run out of shells in a very short amount of time, but who needs shells when they can not even begin to counter America’s full Air Force.

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Pierogi_Master t1_j08b9bk wrote

These are run by the upper echelon of the Pentagon and others in DoD who WOULD take those things and others you (myself, and the public) dont know about into account.

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TheArmoredKitten t1_j085esz wrote

The US would never stand for an actual blockade. It's too important to our interests and the USN would be leveling guns before Chinese ships even left port. If China so much as sneezed in the direction of an American commerical ship, Xi Jinping would find himself at the bottom of a crater before the end of the month.

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kiwifuel t1_j08ezgc wrote

Take over what?

If the west relies less on Taiwan and semiconductor production is diversified, supply chains becomes more robust.

I would argue yes, chips manufactured in Japan gives China less economic leverage, but it’s complicated.

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Yancy_Farnesworth t1_j09ug3j wrote

Neither. China has 0 access to the equipment that fabs leading node chips. People don't seem to understand that there's the fab process and then there's the fab equipment. TSMC, Samsung, and Intel all buy the same fab equipment from the same manufacturers, they don't make their own. All of those companies are from the US, the EU, and Japan. And it's impossible for them to keep these machines working without the expertise and replacement parts from the equipment manufacturers.

If China ever goes to war with Taiwan, they lose access to the entire semiconductor supply chain. Not to mention they also lose access to silicon wafer producers who are almost entirely US and Japan based.

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asianclassical t1_j0a5vah wrote

Part of the reason the US is forcing companies like TSMC to build a fab in the US is to safeguard against the possibility that China retakes Taiwan, either militarily or politically. What people don't realize is that China doesn't have to physically take TSMC to get the technology. All of China's top semiconductor engineers come from TSMC. (There's also one famous one that defected to Samsung.) That's how China has been able to catch up so fast. This year an American company found that China was already producing a type of 7nm chip, when the industry previously thought it would take them 10-15 years to produce below 10nm.

Taiwan's problem is they are a neo-colony. TSMC is majority foreign-owned. They net between 40-50 billion USD a year. But that money doesn't go to the Taiwanese people. Salaries in Taiwan are notoriously low. The quality of life is maintained by keeping prices artificially low on the island, not by raising incomes. (You can see this in the wide discrepancy between nominal GDP and PPP) So it is relatively easy for the mainland to headhunt top TSMC engineers by offering double or triple what they were making before. Biden, taking a lead from Trump, just passed a series of massively protectionist measures without anybody noticing that would and have raised eyebrows of free-market economists:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/economy/biden-chip-technology.html

https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/10/27/biden-s-unprecedented-semiconductor-bet-pub-88270

>In addition, the rules require a license for any “U.S. persons”—which include citizens, permanent residents, anyone who lives in the country, and U.S. companies—to work with Chinese companies contributing to advanced semiconductor production in China. All of these groups have been forced to halt work with Chinese semiconductor firms. This has proven immediately damaging, as leading SME firms have had to stop all servicing of equipment at Chinese fabs and many of these machines need maintenance every couple days in order to continue running. In addition, the dearth of experienced U.S. talent will inhibit Chinese industry, since semiconductor fabrication requires the kinds of intangible skills built up over decades of engineering work and can’t be captured in a blueprint or instruction manual. Prior to the new rules announcement, many U.S., Korean, and Taiwanese engineers had responded to this need by taking lucrative positions in the Chinese semiconductor industry—echoing the way Taiwan built up its own chip industry in past decades.

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Zeduca t1_j0bp238 wrote

Manufacturing and invention of processes are not the same, and are different from designing the chip.

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