How China's Military Views the United States

The naming of the island as a "Republic of China" was done back in the days when both countries thought they had a decent chance of taking over the other one. Taiwan gave that idea up decades ago. China has been a little slow to realize the obvious: that Taiwan has been functioning for over 75 years as an independent country, and for over 120 years with no oversight from China.

 

Some people in Asia are calling it an act of war.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/20/...uth-china-sea-clash-china-intl-hnk/index.html

 

One person is quoted as wanting to live in Chongqing as opposed to the coast, and you think EVERYONE must want to live there? China invested a ton of money in an effort to move millions of their people from the coast to Chongqing, and it failed. They have a massive water supply behind the Three Gorges Dam, and a huge potential for manufacturing there, but people just do not want to move there.

Here is an interesting video on the financial disaster unfolding in China.



The Chinese real estate market is not normal and in no way can be related to western real estate markets. Some facts:

Real estate is the only thing that the average Chinese person can invest in. China's manipulations of the stock market and corporations have made the stock market there entirely unreliable and prone to collapse. About 30% of China's wealth is in real estate.

There is no intention to live in the apartments that are purchased in these ghost cities. They are purely a place to park money. The value of the apartments tend to go up, since it is viewed as a good investment (and there are no other good alternatives for investing). People keep making money from their job, and they have to invest in somewhere, so even useless real estate is a good investment right now. If their economy ever contracts significantly, like after they start a war with Taiwan, their real estate market will likely collapse completely, and drag the rest of their economy down with it.

Most apartments are unfinished. They CAN'T be finished, because finishing them LOWERS the value of the apartment, believe it or not. Chinese superstition holds that buying a completed apartment means accepting all of the bad luck and misfortune of the previous owner, so the apartment needs to be stripped down and re-constructed before it can be occupied. Many, if not most, purchased apartments in ghost cities are lacking plumbing, interior walls, cabinets and flooring.

The real estate companies building these apartments are highly leveraged and finance everything with debt. China's gov't, in an effort to curb the excessive construction, made new rules to decide which real estate companies can be issued loans. None of the real estate companies currently qualifies under the new rules. Basically, that means that ALL real estate companies will be going bankrupt--it's just a matter of when.

My interpretation? Basically, China is building Moai's (Easter Island statues) in the middle of nowhere to store their wealth. They provide no value, as no one will be living in them in the near (and possibly distant) future. It is an investment based on the illusion that it will someday be physically worth something. In the meantime, the investment will deteriorate and crumble, with no money to maintain the buildings and the town itself. Maybe one or two ghost cities might actually attract a company like FoxConn to create demand for apartments for living in, but most will become derelict, and all of the money to build them will have been wasted. When the physical value goes to zero, then the emotional value of the investment will also go to zero, as no one will be willing to buy an apartment that can never be lived in.

 

It should. They risk getting their asses kicked if they invade Taiwan. And they also risk further alienating their wealthiest customers.

But on a historical basis, China ceded control of Taiwan to Japan in 1895, and Japan yielded control of Taiwan after WWII. Communist China did not make a successful bid to take control of Taiwan at that time, and Chang-Kai Shek's forces moved in and took control. The international community recognized Taiwan's right to exist and govern itself, and China has done nothing until now to reverse that decision. If China wanted to keep Taiwan, they should not have given it up to Japan. The current policy is nothing short of empire building a century after empires were dismantled.

 

You should clutch your pearls more tightly, grandma.

 

It would be expensive, but Taiwan could be supplied by air, even for a lot of military equipment. Russia tried to quarantine Berlin in the 1960's, and ultimately, it didn't work.