Strategy of the Middle Kingdom
2026-09-24
The US has started or provoked several wars and conflicts around the world. It’s common to hear people warn that China will take advantage of the distracted US in order to invade Taiwan and reunify China. This is entirely wrong, and can only come from the mind of an American. To China, this is not in their interest, and isn’t how they operate, nor what they’ve built for.
Note, asian politics are crazy, so there are a lot of abbreviations. I’ll be using two-letter country codes, like CN (China) and TW (Taiwan) to refer to the different places, rather than the party names ("Kuomintang") or proper national titles ("Republic of China").
Disclaimer, I’m not an expert on Asia or China. My wife is from Hong Kong, and so I’ve spent a lot of time there. But i’m not a historian or analyst by trade - I’m a software engineer. It’s just that I’ve been right about geopolitics consistently for many years, and China’s outlook and strategy increasingly seems to be the most important thing to understand about where the world is headed. At the very least, there’s more substance and accuracy here than any corporate news outlet.
TODO: table of contents
CN Will Never Let TW Go
CN has never accepted the survival of the nationalist forces of TW. They fought a bloody and bitter civil war, after overthrowing the last Emperor of China and repelling the Japanese invasion during WW2, which the KMT lost. The KMT, with the US’ help, held off the invading communist army and established the Republic of China (what we usually just call Taiwan), in ‘49. CN hates this, to this day, and will never give up trying to reunify China.
So, it’s an immovable goal. It is non-negotiable. But western support for TW is malleable, it can be shifted, bent, and removed. If one side (US) will eventually give up, and the other side won’t (CN), then it’s a question of "when", not "if".
The US Protects TW, Conditionally
Originally, the US was trying to stop the red tide of communism from seizing all of Asia.
Socialism is the most devastating thing to happen to the human race; the top ten figures who have killed the most human beings are all socialists. Communism has been more deadly to humanity than malaria.
While the US’ goals were less altruistic than stopping that, it ultimately amounted to the same thing - stop communism, save lives, install US-friendly nations in Asia to counter rapid RU conquests.
Communist systems inevitably collapse. Now CN/RU/US have all become oligarchies, the ideological motive went away. The US still wants to keep its control over East Asia, but mostly for pure empire reasons. In the meantime, TW became the chip factory of the world; something so valuable that the US now protects it because of its strategic chipmaking.
TSMC is central to advanced technology. Every processor and GPU in the West starts life as a TSMC wafer. Their process is the best on earth, and it’s the only thing that can produce that level of quality. You’re likely reading this on a processor made in TW.
While TSMC isn’t the only reason the US holds onto TW, the loss of TSMC would completely change life for all EU/US citizens overnight. If we could suddenly no longer make computers of any kind, there might legit be a civil war over it.
Quantity Beats Quality
The West broadly falls into the trap of believing that the quality of products beats the quantity of them. WW2 Germany believed that elite troops in the world’s best planes, tanks, or holding the best guns, would win any war. While they dominated peer forces and were incredibly effective against communists, ultimately it was the raw industrial capacity of RU and US that beat them. Throw enough men and steel at an enemy, and it doesn’t matter how good their cannons are. The US is currently repeating Germany’s mistake; believing that superweapons, stealth bombers, cyberattacks, and wunderwaffe in general will defeat any military adversary.
This is true outside military too - we value TSMC so highly, and ban export of many chips to CN, under the belief that it is impossible to compete with us without those chips.
Deepseek, infamously, broke into the AI scene and has gone toe-to-toe with American models without access to the same hardware that we have. All Chinese models are trained on older hardware, or on mass-produced Chinese chips. Their processors and memory aren’t as good as ours, they’re firmly 15 years behind, and the next steps are tough to overcome. But they can make tens of thousands of them, power them with hydro and nuclear, and close that gap with quantity instead of quality. CN is also excellent at optimization; Deepseek was created by abandoning western software that wasted resources, and writing low-level code that only did what was necessary. "100% utilization" doesn’t mean it’s 100% doing useful work, and Deepseek really made it do useful work.
We Do Not Understand War
CN doesn’t have an expeditionary military. "Expeditionary" means they go somewhere else and fight to control foreign land. The US exclusively fields expeditionary forces, we haven’t defended our own land against a foreign invasion in over a cenutry.
This gives us a distorted view of how military power works, you can see it in every conflict we get into. You’ll hear someone say "we killed thousands of them, destroyed their navy, bombed them to the ground, they’d be stupid to keep fighting us". This kind of mentality assumes that the defender has somewhere else to go, some other deal to make, some other option besides defense. Because that’s how we work - if we lose a base, or a ship, then we might get scared a just leave. We have a home to go back to. Our military doesn’t defend our homeland or our people. But that’s what other nation’s militaries do.
This kind of "mathematical victory" doesn’t actually apply to how wars are won. You win a war when you achieve your objectives. If you went to war and said you wanted to destroy a country’s nuclear program, ballistic missile program, and replace their government with a puppet state - and proceed to fail all of that, then you lost that war. It doesn’t matter how many people you killed or buildings you blew up, you lost. They got what they wanted, you didn’t. Nations can (and do) field millions of soldiers, they’ll pull old men out of their homes to stuff them onto the front lines (UA…). Germany famously believed that they were killing enough of the Red Army that there just wouldn’t be anyone else to fight them - but RU kept fielding new armies.
For most countries, their military is built for a very specific conflict. They have one or two wars that they might fight, and so they tailor everything they have to winning those narrow conflicts. This is obvious with Iran - IR has been preparing for this exact war with the US since the 50s, when the US performed a coup to seize power over their country. It backfired, and IR overthrew the US-backed regime. Ever since, IR has prepared for a war with the US. All its training, munitions, assets, and strategy have been aimed at exactly this fight. Analysts and commentators have been saying for decades that IR would defend itself by closing Hormuz, and hitting our bases - yet it was somehow a surprise to IL/US elites when they did exactly that.
The US can’t fight a real war anymore
CN has only needed to worry about the US. India has no expeditionary designs, the Western nations (AU, KR, JP) do not field expeditionary armies capable of touching CN - only the US can, and would, hurt them. So, the CN military is designed to deny the objectives of the US.
The US is not used to large conflicts anymore. The last time we had a major war was Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of Americans died, the draft was contentious, and there was political danger in continuing the war. "Vietnam" is a word that means "pointless disaster", to Americans. Every war since, we’ve become more and more jaded and unwilling to support. Citizens have seen no benefit from any of them, and all it does is further alienate us on the world stage, make us poorer, and leave more grieving families.
Whenever you hear someone try to tell you that the US could invade IR and beat them, we just are "playing nice" or "not serious enough" about it, they’re misunderstanding the problem. Sure, we could send in the 82nd airborne to IR, and they would probably be able to take a foothold in the country. But it would be at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment, and months of bloody conflict. Americans flatly do not support that, and it’s to the point where we might actually do something if our government dragged us into it.
CN knows this. They would never fight us anywhere but right outside their doorstep, which gives them the advantage. Their army is far larger than ours, their weapons, intel, cyber, and space capabilities are comparable to ours - they would lose more men, but they have more men to lose. They would lose more hardware, but they can replace it a hundred times faster than we could. They would win a war if we fought it. If you ever hear someone say we could beat CN, understand that it’s not "unlikely", it’s impossible for us to beat them. Even disregarding them being a nuclear power (more on that later).
How CN Conquers
CN has taken Tibet, Macau, and Hong Kong in the last 40 years. (Inner Mongolia was just a bit earlier than that). All of them were taken with the same strategy - force the foreign power to admit it won’t fight you, and cede its position.
In ‘97, the British Empire was long gone. The Royal Navy barely existed anymore, and certainly could not wage a war on China’s soil and win, like they used to. So, CN called their bluff. Would the UK really fight a war with China over Hong Kong? Would you break your nation apart in order to hold onto this land? The answer was no, and CN took HK peacefully, without a shot being fired.
They win without fighting. Be enough of a threat that they enemy decides it’s better not to fight you.
Don’t Force The Question
The West is in rapid decline - the petrodollar is exhausted, our technological lead is barely noticeable, we have no manufacturing left, we’re enduring an ethnographic assault on our population, our birthrates are dwindling, and our elites have become globalist and totally disconnected from the consequences of their actions.
CN doesn’t need to fight a war. It just needs to call our bluff. Given all these conditions, would the US really lose millions of men and its entire treasury, just to hold onto TW?
Again, the answer today is "probably yes", because if TSMC goes down, then the western world would be in such severe trouble that we might overthrow our elites. But what if TSMC wasn’t valuable?
China has an EUV manhattan project, which aims to be able to do what TSMC does. It has prototypes that work well, but it’s not yet on par, and not scaled. It does have a DV process (a prior generation of technology) that works great, and mass produces on a level that’s hard for us to comprehend. CN can keep pace with our AI or cloud hyperscaling, without needing the highest quality chips to do so. If TSMC makes a chip 5x better than Alibaba can, then Alibaba needs to make 5x more chips to be on the same footing.
This is a complicated subject, HBM (high-bandwidth-memory) is a technology all its own, and there’s more to it than this. But in general, CN hasn’t suffered for lack of TSMC - it has matched the west in every technological department. There is no field where CN doesn’t have a comparable product to the West.
Moreover, if CN can produce chips at the level of TSMC, then TSMC loses its value. Why lose millions of men in a war over TW when we could lose nothing and use CN chips?
Strike At Their Weakest Time
Now that the US has started wars with RU and IR, our interceptors are depleted, our armor and weapons are shown to be very destroyable, we’re not replacing armaments hardly at all (so much so that SK had to send a large amount of its artillery shells to UA in ‘25, rather than the US producing more), our country is splitting apart politically, and so forth.
If your enemy is having these problems, you don’t start a fight right away. You observe them, you wait, you want their problems to continue to worsen. By doing nothing, you’re improving your own position relative to theirs. If you see them start to address their issues - mass deportations, restarting manufacturing, reapprochment with your proxies, purging communists from public life, etc - then that is the time to strike, because they’re going to get stronger if you continue to wait. You want to fight them at their weakest.
We’re not at our weakest, yet. We’re pretty weak, but we can, and will, go much lower than this.
Don’t Forget Kim
North Korea, like CN, has built its military to fight exactly one war - with the US over South Korea. NK has as many soldiers as the US, it has nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and miles of artillery all pointed at SK, with some extra reserved for JP. In the past, this was a survival strategy - the only thing that prevents a US invasion is having nuclear weapons, and something nearby to use them on that the US cares about. But, that survival strategy is more like a trump card now. They’re one of the only nations on earth that is capable of beating the US on the field, and is designed to defeat a US vassal nation (SK).
SK cannot defend itself, it relies wholly on the US for that. When NK goes to war, it will win. SK’s strategy presumes losing Seoul-si (and 51% of its population) in the opening move, and having a Manuever Corps and amphibious strike force to slow the advance long enough for the US to intervene. Without the US, there is no southern victory; the best they could hope for is a stalled conflict where only Busan remains under SK hands.
It seems to me that this is a perfect move for CN to play, when they’re ready. They prefer to call western bluffs and threaten a conflict that the West has no stomach for (like HK). But, if the US did decide to pull a Lincoln-esque move, demanding that it never cede territory to anyone regardless of means or motive, then the Korean Peninsula is the perfect battleground to fight. It would become "another Ukraine", drawing formal US troops (not just contractors, intel operatives, and equipment, as with UA) into a lengthy land war that it is not equipped to win. And it, like all the other fronts, doesn’t directly pull CN into open conflict with the US - it’s NK doing the fighting, after all.
Such a war would completely tie up the US forces, and depending on how it goes, would be the perfect time to open up a TW invasion. In this hypothetical, the US is fighting RU, IR, NK, and CN simultaneously, and mostly alone - after already having exhausted its interceptors, demonstrated the limits of a carrier group’s effectiveness and staying power, and lost a dozen bases. When better to take TW? The US could not sustain a four front war.
On the other hand, if the US cedes SK, then it could just as easily cede TW.
Fission
In a hot conflict, nukes aren’t inevitable.
We’ve held a sort of odd view for the last couple generations - summed up as "if anyone uses a nuke, then everyone will immediately use nukes, and nobody will win". But this isn’t quite right, in fact it’s only even possible in a conflict between two specific countries.
RU has the most nuclear weapons in the world, the US second. While other nations have weapons, they don’t have enough to create the sort of Fallout-like apocalypse that we imagine. Everyone else put together has fewer than the US.
So, this doomsday scenario only exists if the US and RU both decide to throw all their nukes at each other all at once. CN and NK cannot threaten the US with nukes, even if they wanted to. They have them, and it’s insurance against a US invasion, but if they used them it wouldn’t be enough to even end the US as a nation, let alone the whole world.
Why Aren’t Nukes Used?
Why then, is the US unwilling to invade countries with nukes? Why is Kim safe, but Gaddafi and Saddam (who gave up their nuclear programs) are dead? Why is even a latent threat (ie, IR) not enough, but actual warheads are?
If nuking enemies become normal, the US loses more than anyone.
There’s a version of this that, optimistically, imagines that all the nations of the world understand that any amount of nuclear conflict escalates, does permanent damage to the planet, and ultimately becomes an uncontrolled threat to our species’ continuance.
But, practically, it would mean the US can’t maintain escalation dominance. This is something we’re bad at anyway, but with nukes it might actually end the nation.
Regardless of who shoots the "first" nuke or why, nuclear conflict would hit US finance, technology,
