If Taiwan votes to join China voluntarily, resolves N/A

What counts as ‘votes’? What if it doesn’t go to referendum, but is decided by the elected leadership? What if there are accusations of voter fraud? What if it’s decided by a coup? What about a popular uprising? What about crushing a popular uprising?

What counts as ‘voluntarily’ and ‘forceful takeover’? If it happens under threat of sanctions? A blockade? Capture of outlying islands?

What about ‘unambiguously part of China’? Does a return to the 1992 Consensus count? An arrangement that it becomes a self-governing region with its own military in a 1C2S+ setup?

Feels like YES should have gotten a boost over the last week because the US more will have a president who won't give a shit. I'd put more on yes but am already too invested

Has there been any good analysis on how AI (via extrapolating capabilities advances over the next few years) would benefit drones in a China vs Taiwan conflict?

Considering China’s greater productive capacity and drone expertise would that not mitigate previous disadvantages such as those surrounding amphibious invasions?

What sources are the people voting No reading? Every other week I see an article like this one where the message is "A war is imminent, and if it happens now no one including the US will be willing or able to defend Taiwan. But maaaybe if we're lucky we can turn things around in a few years?" https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/happy-fun-cold-war-2-update

The fact that this market is still below 50% is baffling to me, but unfortunately I'm tapped out of mana since loans were discontinued.

@jonsimon I wonder the same. This discussion of a wargame exercise of the scenario left me extremely pessimistic even if the US decided to fully engage to defend: https://thechinaproject.com/2023/08/17/wargaming-a-taiwan-invasion-scenario/

Taiwan has a much larger (peace time) military budget than Ukraine, amphibious invasions are much harder than land invasions, the US is economically dependent on Taiwan in a way it does not depend on the Ukraine

The games discussed in the link (while biased) mostly resulted in Chinese losses: https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan

Finally, I don't think any of this accounts for the relatively recent discovery of corruption within the ranks of Chinese defense ministers. I think the impact of the "water in missiles" (instead of fuel) story is relatively inconsequential to the success of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but the general corruption story is not a positive signal for their success

I recommend listening to The China Project podcast I linked. It discusses that exact wargame exercise. Despite the report predicting a "victory" of Taiwan the report predicts incredible loses for the US. Multiple carriers list in the first 36hrs alone. However, there are substantial issues with the wargaming exercise. It assumes that China would only use their fairly small number of amphibious landing crafts. However, there is good reason to believe they'd use their merchant marine which would get them to 5k-10k vessels.

The good news is that the US has new missiles coming online which should help, but we the number of vessels China can bring is just absolutely overwhelming

Ships are easy to damage or destroy - Ukraine doesn't have a navy to speak of and has damaged/destroyed 27 Russian ships. Taiwan actually has F-16s plus their own aircraft (unlike Ukraine).

If Taiwan and the US maintain air superiority, that would be a huge problem for the Chinese fleet.

These ships only need to make it across the straight and let troops off. AFAIK in the wargame exercise US and Taiwan struggled destroying the ~100 dedicated amphibian landing crafts.

For this to resolve YES China needs to successfully invade Taiwan, so the ships need to be part of a robust supply line that can support hundreds of thousands of soldiers, potentially engaged in continuous high end combat for months.

That does not NEED to happen. A shock and awe campaign forcing an early victory/surrender is also a possibility, not saying it is probable but definitely possible.

There won't be "high-end combat for months". Taiwan is small, especially the more populated part. I'm also not convinced the US would continue to support Taiwan after losing 3 carriers within hours. As much as I want it, the domestic support won't be there.

I think you underestimate how vital Taiwan is to the current US economy

There will be an enormous amount of public and political support for Taiwan. A successful invasion of Taiwan would decimate the market caps of Apple, Nvidia, etc. It would be worth billions (trillions?) of dollars to prevent the successful invasion of Taiwan for the US. $50 billion in ships would be a pittance and merely galvanize the west

@PlainBG I don't think it matters that a quick victory is possible, unless the PRC feels so limited for options that they would invade believing they would lose a protracted conflict.

Even a campaign numbered in days would need continuous logistical support, which means being able to move shipping continuosly across the strait. But the PRC has to plan for things going much worse, which means they need a credible supply line for much longer.

We have no idea what Xi's generals say to him, but we know that they are very realistic in their own writing. It's very hard to predict how things would go, but I'm pretty confident that their approach won't be "Hostomol but this time it works"

A blockade that results in Taiwan under duress agreeing to be ruled by the CCP would count as "forceful takeover" even though it's not a duration, right?

@Enlil I think it should, yeah.

@Daniel_MC please don't spam markets, I just got five different notifications from you

Presumably Xi is making the same conditional calculation. If the chance of success is below 70-80%, does he go for it? I'm very doubtful. He's a not perfect Bayesian computer, but he would require a high degree of confidence from military and intel analysis. The only scenario in which China invades without a good chance of success is if they are "forced" into it by risky actions taken by Taiwan, but I do not think that is likely either.

What about Penghu and other outlying islands? Do they count as Taiwan for the purposes of this question? Let’s say the PRC takes over Kinmen as a show of force and is successful at that but stops there. I suspect it does not resolve YES, right? A different scenario: the PRC takes over the main island (Taiwan proper) but not Penghu. There is historical precedent of this with Penghu staying under Dutch control while the main island was not. Is that enough to resolve YES?

@mariopasquato Minor outlying jurisdictions don't count.

@IsaacKing Penghu’s population is 0.4% of Taiwan’s total so it’s certainly minor in this respect. Thanks for the clarification.

If there is no invasion attempt, I assume that also results in an N/A resolution?

@EvanDaniel When?

@IsaacKing Oh, are we just leaving this one open forever? All right :D

@EvanDaniel It remains open until they invade or either country ceases to exist, yeah.