jintao.hu

Per a senior Chinese government official, if Taiwan declares independence, China will fight Taiwan whatever happens.

If so, what do you think who will win the war? reason?



I think China will win the war, because Taiwan is an inalienable part of China...

will give more reason and idea...

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dave lukins

Do the Taiwanese think of themselves as Chinese?

astralis

taiwan will win and liberate china from the communist bandits.

we will re-unify china under the glorious leadership of ma-yingjeou, whose awesome movie-star face will cause the PLA to go gay and massively surrender to the ROCA.

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Silent Hunter

If the Americans don't join in, China.

If they do, no-one wins.

Dreadnought

The cost of freedom and democracy is NEVER free.

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ChrisF202

Maybe China should stay out of the affairs of sovereign nations and let free people govern themselves? Why does China always have to go around invading other nations based on a map from 1,000 years ago?

Tibet, India, Vietnam, the list goes on and on.

crooks

Agreed, well said.

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astralis

chris,

notwithstanding my mocking above...it ain't that easy. and i'm saying this as a taiwanese.

wkllaw

No one wins the war, the economic ruin will be really immense for both sides that no one will truly emerge as a clear winner. Even if one side does achieve their political aim, the economical destruction will make it seem like both sides lost in the end.

Both sides have little to gain and everything to lose.

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gunnut

Let's for the sake of the argument isolate the situation to only China and Taiwan. What do you think China can do to Taiwan militarily?

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gunnut

Is Taiwan really a nation? Tibet, and Vietnam were more or less buffer zones for China, and have always been under the influence. India is a totally seperate culture(s) and a totally seperate people(s). China has never claimed India. Taiwan is a different issue. Most of the people in Taiwan are from China, or descendents of people who came from China. Chinese culture runs deep there. China, both under the Nationalist government and the CCP government, claim Taiwan as a part of China. Only the Taiwan independence movement want Taiwan to be seperate.

If you restrict the geographical area to Taiwan only, then you can say more people want Taiwan to be independent. But if you include China, then more people want Taiwan to stay with China. I'm all for democracy but where do we draw the line?

Maggot

The same argument could be applied to America. Many of the people in the US are descended from people from the UK. UK culture runs deep there. Technically they should just suck it up and be part of the British Empire, because only the people who fought against the crown in the War of Independence wanted the US to be separate from the UK.

China is a nasty piece of work. They're a dictatorship that defies the international community all the time. They ignore the widescale counterfeiting of our products. They artificially devalue their currency and generally thumb their nose at the rest of the world. They invaded India and Tibet, and are angry if anyone even talks to the Dalai Lama, let along honour his work. They're supplying weapons to Sudan, Iran, the Taleban, and just about everyone else we don't want to have weapons. I would say that there are a lot of good reasons why we don't want them to expand to Taiwan as well. Yet for some reason, as long as they slather lead paint on cheap toys for Wallmart they're all right in our books. China always seems to get a free pass when they least deserve it.

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gunnut

Yes, I have thought about that too. But if we think about it, the colonies declared independence 150 years after being established. And that's during an age of poor communication. A letter from England won't reach the colonies for a good month or two.

Taiwan had been seperate from China for 50 years. Direct communication has been re-established over the last 10 years. Their economies are quite intertwined right now. Taiwan businesses have set up manufacturing plants all over China. With the advent of the internet, communication is virtually instantaneous.

I absolutely agree. I believe that's why we support the one-China policy. We recognize the CCP as the ruler of China, but we also support the Nationalist Taiwan, who claims China, just to tweak China's nose a bit.

If Taiwan becomes independent then we effectively say we give in to communist rule of China.

Feanor

The funny part of the whole debate is that Taiwan claims Mongolia to be part of it. If Taiwan were to re-conquer the Chinese mainland, I do wonder what will happen to the poor Mongolians.

Maggot

China’s biggest problem remains moving the horde from point A to point B. On the continent they can march, but China lacks the naval power to transport their forces in the needed strength to invade Taiwan. China has spent a lot on missiles, modernizing their airforce, and building their navy. Yes China would suffer huge casualties in an all out invasion of Taiwan, but when was the last time you saw China particularly concerned with casualties. They’re not exactly suffering from a manpower shortage. They could literally march one citizen into the sea every ten seconds and build a human land bridge to Taiwan and not have their population be adversely affected.

They have the largest military hovercrafts in the world, which while they are too large to be offloaded from other ships, have just enough range to go from China’s coast to Taiwan. They’ve got a whole lot of amphibious attack ships and lots of landing craft, but not nearly enough to get the numbers they want ashore. That and there are doubts that the exact numbers claimed are accurate in some cases, like the Type 271 Landing Craft the Chinese suddenly claimed to have hundreds of. Their only aircraft carrier is for helicopters only.

China has a lot of jets, a whole lot more than Taiwan, but they have very old bombers and Russia isn’t interested in them getting their hands on new bombers anytime soon. China has been buying a lot of Su-27’s and 30’s from Russia, but the Chinese aren’t doing a good job on their maintenance or training of pilots with their new jets. Some of these jets also have components from the new Su-37.

Taiwan has a bunch of F-16’s, home built backwards engineered F-16’s (IDF), and some Mirage 2000’s. Their edge in fighters is dropping all the time, increasing China’s chances. The Taiwan army is primarily tasked, trained, and designed for counter-landing. Not a big surprise. Their constant state of readiness has impacted their ability to train and retain soldiers though and in 1998 the head of the Army actually ordered a general stand down from their state of constant operational readiness to deal with this. Without the US navy, Taiwan is probably toast.