76. Taiwan is Toast

(Epistemic status: A prophecy of the shape of things to come, if one that seems well-attested. "The sun will rise around this time a year to the day from now" is a prophecy, too.)

Taiwan is toast. There, I said it, roll credits.

The Republic of China is one of a handful of strange carveouts in the world of Westphalian sovereignty and the (supposedly) rules-based international order, alongside such curiosities as the Vatican, Portugal's exclaves in Africa, Singapore, Lesotho, Cootch-Behar, Bir Tawil, Transnistria, and French Guiana. Unlike the rest of these, it has been a locus of geopolitical struggle since its effective founding. A rump state of the post-Qing Chinese state, it was founded in 1912, but only took on its current form after the vicious betrayals and grand atrocities of the Chinese Civil War, the brief pause to fight off the Japanese, and not-quite-final defeat of Kuomintang forces followed by flight to Taiwan, where it has remained ever since. Until the early 50s, it was still universally considered the true and legitimate China, holding its veto power and permanent security council seat among the other four winners of World War Two. (And what is it that's been said about which numbers need no justification?) It has persisted only through the repeated and sustained interventions of Western powers, most notably the United States of America. Everyone involved has maintained the polite fiction that Taiwan is part of the same government as the mainland - that of the People's Republic of China - so as to avoid upsetting the applecart of international trade and (relative, temporary, crumbling) peace. But this state of affairs has lasted for the last 80 years. What exactly has changed now such that I consider its fate sealed?

In order to understand the gameboard of geopolitics, one must understand the players and their interests. The maxim goes that nation-states have no permanent agreements and no permanent friends - only permanent interests. In the bleak world of international relations, kindness, charity, and steadfastnness are luxuries that no one can afford and that no one who sticks around wants. What, then, are China's permanent interests? It wants internal stability, and internal prosperity to secure it. It wants access to the high seas, with all the unrestricted trade and projection of military force that that entails. It wants peaceful borders and a place in the sun as a Great Power, and the bleeding-edge technological advantage that that entails. And like all Great Powers, it wants the immiseration, conquest, and death of its enemies, bygone or not; it wants to trim loose threads. Such is their prerogative, in a world of international anarchy and consequent barbarism. The US is no better, and if the EU is better about that now, it's at the cost of greater brutality about border security and a far vaster pile of looted colonial wealth.

Taiwan directly strikes at every single one of these desires. There can be no internal stability with a sworn enemy just off the coast - just imagine if Cuba was where the Bahamas are, or the Confederates had won their Golden Circle and conquered half the Carribean, fleeing and settling there to this day. There can be no peaceful borders in such a world, and Taiwan makes for a perfect staging ground for any future invasion and for present influence and espionage operations. China harbors obvious and open irredentist ambitions towards Taiwan - how could it not? And most notably, the US-led order has consciously maintained a policy of containment - the same policy of containment that worked reasonably well against the USSR - against the PRC. China has but a single contiguous coast, and that coast is held by US allies, US military bases, and effective US proxies.

 

Start with the South China Sea, host to ongoing geopolitical squabbles, with a good five countries laying claim to the same patch of sea. Vietnam, a staunch Chinese ally in bygone days, has sought closer ties to the US in recent decades due to a pattern of Chinese border aggression. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore, while no friend to the US, are no friend to China either. They prefer a neutral stance, trying to play both sides off against each other and profiting handsomely off of trade through the Strait of Malacca and Java Sea. The South China Sea itself is terribly shallow - too shallow by far to support a proper blue-water navy - and even if it weren't, the Philippines are a longtime US ally, blocking the way there. Up in the North we find the Manchurian coast. Japan and South Korea are both solid US allies, too, and play host to numerous military bases; Japan in particular includes a sprawling chain of tiny islands - the world's most perfect harbor chain. By contrast, North Korea is at best a hyper-local proxy, mired in maximalist authoritarian control and well behind its neighbors in the south; they can't contribute to Chinese naval ambitions, not least because they too are caught in the same net. In the south,  But what about the center? The East China Sea is vast and deep, and surely a power like China could punch through that chain; then not even actual US territory like Guam and the Northern Marianas could keep them in check. The solution is what has been referred to as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" - Taiwan. Taiwan is the center, the keystone, without which the rest falls apart. A PRC-controlled Taiwan would be a cutting point, separating two living groups in north and south; the Philippine Sea would be open to China, then.

And even if those weren't sufficient motive, Xi Jinping has spoken of his legacy to think about. He is an old man, a prime example of the gerontocracy of the modern world, and craves a national victory to be remembered at nearly any cost. And on top of all of that, there's the AI angle to think about: Taiwan is one of the world's biggest sources of computer chips, including the GPUs so vital to training foundation models; TSMC is the biggest supplier of Nvidia, AMD, and Apple and a crucial part of the compute supply chain. If China were to seize that manufacturing base, it would massively swing the balance of compute in its favor, and even if Taiwan set itself on fire to deny China a clean win, that would still mean denying that same base to the West. In a world where a decisive strategic advantage goes to the winner of an accelerating AGI arms race, Taiwan finds itself squarely in the world's crosshairs from all sides; there's an argument that the US would destroy Taiwan itself, if it looked like Taiwan might cleanly capitulate.

Fine, that's the motive. What of the opportunity? Here's the issue with being Taiwan: they're an island nation with few natural resources; at the same time, they depend almost entirely on high technology and technological exports for their economic viability. In turn, those high-tech products are utterly dependent on electrical power - and lots of it, so tidal and geothermal power aren't going to cut it and hydroelectric power isn't even an option. But Taiwan is a small island country, lacking much land area; wind power - even offshore wind - won't suffice, for lack of land to put it, and solar - photovoltaic, solar-thermal, doesn't matter - is yet worse-off. Fusion's not coming anywhere near fast enough, so that leaves two major options: fission and carbon. Taiwan lacks much of both, and must import them; fuel-grade uranium wipes the floor with liquified natural gas, oil, and especially coal, for sheer power density per kilogram or per cubic meter; it beats them all by over 6 orders of magnitude. This is sharply relevant, given that nearly every scrap of power-generating fuel must be brought in by ship or perhaps plane (which would be more expensive and more weight-constrained still). So you would expect that Taiwan would cling to fission plants like their lives depended on it. But the Democratic Progressive Party - the major political opponents to the Kuomintang - won power in the late 2010s and used their platform to pursue denuclearization of power in the aftermath of the Fukushima crisis, with wide popular mandate. The very last fission plants in Taiwan were decommissioned in May of last year; now Taiwan gets over 80% of its power needs from carbon fuels, and the wrecking balls that took down catenary towers were hammer-blows nailing Taiwan's coffin shut. They have set themselves up such that any disruption to Taiwanese imports would rapidly spell disaster for their economy.

Motive, opportunity - what of the means? Obviously China could simply wipe Taiwan off the map, if they felt that violating their own hard taboos on nuclear first-use. Equally, they could blast the island to rubble, if they thought that international condemnation and a likely US military response were worth weathering. But the hell of it is, neither of those are particularly necessary. China could, if it chose, try to enact a traditional naval blockade, but that would see traditional US responses, and China might not want to risk that kind of open brinksmanship. Modern problems, as they say, require modern solutions: pirate proxies, loitering munitions, and sea drones are all much lower-profile ways of interfering with shipping. It wouldn't even need to be a perfect blockade: even a substantially increased risk of sunk ships and lost cargo would send insurance premiums skyrocketing and make shipping to Taiwan a losing business proposition. The South China Sea is already a relative hotspot for shipping losses; what more might happen, if the number of lost commerce ships went from 50 to 500? Even delays to shipping and cumbersome inspections would mean economic damage on par with piracy. China need not deploy main force to make times dangerously thin for Taiwan.

What of the shape of things of come, then? I anticipate further buildup of Mischief Reef-style constructed island bases in the South China Sea. I predict continued Chinese overtures towards Malaysia and Indonesia, as would break the cordon in the south, and for China to exercise different irredentist claims to try to take the Russian Pacific as was seized from the Qing by the Tsar, as would break the cordon in the north, along with getting China the largest source of fresh water in the world; Russia is already bleeding itself white in the west, has alienated all of its potential allies, and can hardly claim foul play on imperial aggression. And I predict just the sort of naval pseudo-blockade as described above against Taiwan in the coming few years as the Second Cold War heats up, this time between two moribund Great Powers rather than ones at the height of their strength, this time over AGI instead of nuclear arms.

And moribund they both are. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the American Empire's decline; the cost of its overseas bases, the slow but steady erosion of democratic norms, the hypercapitalist stripping of copper from the walls of the nation-building and of society, and the more recent diplomatic blowups and threats towards allies and ripping up of treaties. But China is little better off here: the demographic ripple effects of the One Child Policy are showing clear; the fancy new construction of the past decade will begin to show its age in perhaps another twenty years; rising demands for standards of living by the near billion-and-a-half people in China will put increased pressure on power plants and especially resource-intensive meat farming; and most ironically, China's frenemy status with the US means that the US's decline is the very same as the decline of China's biggest market, which means losses in manufacturing jobs, which means internal instability.

In short: we're in for interesting times.