China - Taiwan [Including others involved]

[Pelican]

America Sends Warships To Help Taiwan Against Chinese Missiles - China Taiwan Latest News

See - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzbtm4iQEGg

Note comment below the video:
"India Today
While China is conducting military campaigns in Taiwan, US is countering it with its warships. Here's a detailed list of who has deployed what in and around Taiwan.
Five ballistic missiles fired by China appear to have landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), Japanese defence minister Nobuo Kishi said on Thursday, part of military exercises launched by China earlier in the day."
Etc. etc.

More topics on same subject here - https://www.scmp.com/topics/us-china-relations

[Pelican]

One person's view but worth a read. The last quarter refers to Taiwan.

The great fall of China
Will a housing revolt, jobs crisis and ‘zero Covid’ douse the dragon’s fire?


China is being swept by a new kind of protest — stealthy, rapid and difficult for the country’s communist leaders to suppress. Tens of thousands of homebuyers are withholding mortgage payments on their unfinished homes, fearing their money is being stolen by property developers.

The mortgage strike is snowballing and has reached more than 100 cities. Nine out of ten new properties in China are sold before they are finished, and advance payments are a lifeline for developers and banks. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is rattled and attempting to erase news of the protest from social media to stop the strikers organising.

The authorities have summoned China’s beleaguered banks to emergency talks to find a way out of a morass that threatens the health of the country’s tottering financial system.

The revolt comes just days after the authorities sent in violent thugs to break up a protest by depositors demanding their money back from a series of failed regional banks. These are symptoms of the rotten state of the country’s debt-ridden banks and property companies — at a time when even China’s own, often inflated, growth figures show the economy is grinding to a halt.

Globally, China is increasingly overextended and unloved. It is all a long way from the vaunting promise of the “China century” — which in 2015 motivated David Cameron to raise a pint with a visiting Xi Jinping in an attempt to make Britain China’s “best friend in the West”.

The Tory leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are now vying to sound tough on Beijing. Yet whoever becomes prime minister may well find themselves dealing not with a rising China but with a China that is past its peak, the CCP facing the sort of decline it so frequently wishes on the West.

There is little sign that either Sunak or Truss understands what “peak China” might mean.

The bubble bursts
In the eyes of many Chinese people, the party’s legitimacy lies in its ability to deliver growth and stability — and both are now under strain. Xi wants a party conclave later this year to endorse his third term in office, opening the way for him to rule for life and making him the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. But he has made many enemies and rumours are swirling of growing opposition. His power grab no longer looks so certain.

China’s property bubble is bursting after two decades of frenzied construction, which has seen entire metropolises sprout across the country, built on rampant speculation, vast and empty “ghost cities” with all the trappings of urban life but without the people.

By one estimate, China has 65 million empty apartments, almost enough to give one each to the entire population of Britain.

Property is the main driver of the economy, accounting for almost a third of China’s GDP. A large chunk of local government income comes from selling land to the property developers. By late 2020, property-related lending accounted for an astonishing 39 per cent of bank loans, according to Chinese regulators. The property sector is in many ways a microcosm of the wider economy: a scary combination of eyewatering debt, lack of transparency and diminishing returns on wasteful investment.

This has been exacerbated by Xi’s economically suicidal “zero Covid” policy, with its endless lockdowns, which are further squeezing life out of the economy.

Last week, the authorities locked down a million people in Wuhan, the city where the virus was first detected in 2019, after the discovery of just four asymptomatic cases.

Almost one in five young people between 16 and 24 are out of work. Gross domestic product in the April-June quarter grew by a paltry 0.4 per cent from a year earlier. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, the economy shrank, down 2.6 per cent compared with January to March. The days of double-digit growth are long over.

In the longer term, China is facing an acute demographic crisis, a self-inflicted legacy of its now-abandoned one-child policy. The population has begun to shrink and some estimates suggest that by mid-century as many as a third of Chinese will be 65 or older, putting extreme strains on growth and the country’s overwhelmed hospitals and underfunded pension system. The government’s attempts to provide incentives for bigger families have had little impact.

The CCP insists it can innovate its way through, moving away from a labour-intensive economy. Yet Xi has targeted China’s most successful tech companies, tightening party control — hardly the best way of encouraging innovation. And China’s ability to steal, copy and otherwise vacuum-up western technology is becoming more difficult as western countries tighten their controls, and generally become far warier of Beijing.

Wary investors
Other nations’ policies of engaging with China — embracing its rise and avoiding too much criticism in the belief that both the country and the world will become better places as a result — has come under scrutiny as a result of Beijing’s repression at home and increased belligerence abroad.

The CCP has not hesitated to use investment, trade and market access as tools of coercion. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s weaponising of hydrocarbons has been a wake-up call about the danger of overdependence on any repressive country with aggressive global ambitions. Even in areas such as climate change, where there appear to be shared interests, there are serious doubts that Beijing’s word can be trusted, as it has sharply stepped up its burning of coal.

Many foreign firms, once infatuated by its market, now regard Xi’s China as uninvestible. It has become an altogether more hostile place to do business. Human rights abuses, notably in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, put firms’ reputations at risk, and they are wary of being caught in the geopolitical crossfire between China and the West. The talk in boardrooms is now of building “resilience” into supply chains — shorthand for lessening dependence on China.

The CCP has armed itself with a rash of new security, data and cyber laws, empowering it to take out through the front door what it used to steal from the back. The number of foreigners employed in China’s two largest cities has declined sharply over the past decade, a trend accelerated by Covid-19. Hong Kong is also experiencing an unprecedented exodus.

Running out of road
China’s principal vehicle for buying overseas influence, its Belt and Road programme, is under severe strain. The programme is peddled as a multitrillion-dollar programme of infrastructure investment, blessing the world with Chinese-built roads, railways, ports, airports, power stations and telecoms. Xi has described it as “a project of the century”. In reality, it is riddled with murky projects and has saddled the poorest of countries with unpayable debt. It is a classical neocolonial enterprise, a tool used by Beijing to shape the world in its image and coerce countries to support its interests. AidData, a research group, has identified 13,427 projects worth $843 billion across 165 countries over an 18-year period. This makes China the world’s largest creditor. It covers every major world region, though Beijing feels most comfortable dealing with thugs and kleptocrats.

Sri Lanka has defaulted on its loans and descended into turmoil; its leader, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the country and quit as president. He and his brother, Mahinda, an earlier leader, were good friends of China, and on their watch Sri Lanka borrowed an estimated $10 billion from Beijing. This funded a binge of projects, dismissed by critics as white elephants. They included a port and airport in Hambantota, the Rajapaksas’ hometown, a cricket stadium and a 350m tower in the capital Colombo, topped by a giant lotus that was supposed to represent a “brilliant future” of co-operation with Beijing.

The debt crisis in Sri Lanka may be a sign of what is to come in other poorer countries, where the debt burden is the highest in decades. A slowing world economy, Covid-19 and soaring food and energy costs are all playing a part, but another common denominator is costly and murky Chinese projects going bad.

Pakistan, the biggest recipient of funds from China, may be the next to default. In Myanmar — whose generals have also been showered with CCP largesse — the projects are overshadowed by a worsening civil war. Chinese-owned lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo have faced violent protests. Even in Greece, where Chinese investors were welcomed as saviours of Piraeus port, they are now accused of environmental degradation and failing to deliver on promises.

Criticism at home
Beijing has no experience of dealing with an international debt crisis, which it has played a large part in creating. It largely shuns multilateral approaches to solving the problem, and the unravelling is sure to shed unflattering light on opaque projects riddled with corruption and mismanagement.

Recent studies of global opinion show China’s image in freefall. The reasons range from the cover-up of the initial Covid-19 outbreak to atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, Xi’s support of Vladimir Putin’s barbarity in Ukraine and the behaviour of China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats, who have replaced measured words with threats and abuse.

There are those in China who recognise the problems, and lonely voices have criticised Xi’s lockdowns, economic mismanagement and the snarling diplomacy that has made an enemy of the world. Xi has been ruthless in eliminating rivals and crushing dissent, so much of the criticism is coded and cautious, but it is growing.

A challenge for the West is that a China past its peak may also be a more dangerous and unpredictable China. The CCP under Xi has become an instrument of belligerent ethnic nationalism, underpinned by grievance and victimhood, and built around the cult of Xi. He has a dark and paranoid world view. He will be sorely tempted to divert attention from his mounting problems at home with aggression against Taiwan.

Yet predictions of inevitable military conflict between China and the US are far too gloomy. Xi has overplayed his hand, and there will be many opportunities for liberal democracies to reassert their influence and values that fall well short of armed confrontation.

For more than three decades, Beijing successfully eroded and blunted western power by numerous means short of warfare. China is now an established power, vulnerable to the very “war by other means” in which it so excelled as the underdog.

Britain and its allies have set up multibillion-dollar international infrastructure investment funds aimed at countering Beijing’s economic influence in poorer countries. A patchwork of coalitions, ranging from the Pacific islands to the Commonwealth, are being reinvigorated and repurposed.

“Crazy, tiny Lithuania”, as the Baltic state has been dubbed by Beijing for allowing Taiwan to open a de facto embassy, has become a role model for standing up to CCP bullying. Likewise Australia, dubbed “scumbags” and subjected to economic sanctions after calling for an independent inquiry into the origin of Covid.

James Schlesinger, who served as US secretary of defence at the height of the Cold War, cautioned against what he called “10ft-tall syndrome” — exaggerating the strength and intellect of the Soviet Union without accounting sufficiently for its vulnerabilities. China is a serious global threat, perhaps more so than the USSR ever was, but it is not 10ft tall — far from it — and is facing mounting challenges, largely of its own making.

Xi’s boasts about creating a new China-centric world order now ring hollow. China’s hubris has created numerous vulnerabilities, which provide opportunities to push back — if liberal democracies and those who share those values are willing and confident enough to assert their interests.

Source - An author Ian Williams in the Sunday Times on 31st July 2022

[Pelican]

The China–Taiwan stand-off

What are we to make of US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and the subsequent rumpus?
Eighty-two-year-old Pelosi was the first senior representative of the US administration to visit Taiwan over the last twenty-five years, and she made the trip in the face of fierce opposition from the Chinese government and even against the expressed wishes of President Biden. Clearly, nobody tells her what to do!

See - https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-chi ... PRqtSExNWw

[Pelican]

China 'ready to defeat any provocation' as two US Navy ships sail through Taiwan Strait

It comes just weeks after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, an occasion that angered China.
Continues, with embedded links, at - https://news.sky.com/story/china-ready- ... t-12683614

Link from Tim.


See also - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-62704449

[Pelican]

The chip war the West must win


China spends more on microchips than it does on oil. It means the fight for Taiwan has historic significance.

The destroyer USS Mustin slipped into the northern end of the Taiwan Strait on August 18, 2020, its five-inch gun pointed southward as it began a solo mission to sail through the Strait and reaffirm that these international waters were not controlled by China — at least not yet. A stiff breeze whipped across the deck as it steamed south. To the east, the island of Taiwan rose in the distance, a broad, densely settled coastal plain giving way to tall peaks hidden in clouds.

On deck, 96 launch cells stood ready, each capable of firing missiles that could precisely strike planes, ships or submarines hundreds of miles away.

As the USS Mustin travelled on, bristling with computerised weaponry, the People’s Liberation Army announced a retaliatory series of live-fire exercises around Taiwan, practising what one Beijing-controlled newspaper called a “reunification-by-force operation”.

But on this particular day, China’s leaders were less worried about the US Navy and more about an obscure US business regulation called the Entity List, which limits the transfer of American technology abroad.

Previously, the Entity List had primarily been used to prevent sales of, say, missile parts or nuclear materials. Now, though, the US government was dramatically tightening the rules governing computer chips, which had become ubiquitous in both military systems and consumer goods.

The target was China’s Huawei, which sells smartphones, telecoms equipment, cloud-computing services and other advanced technologies. The US feared that its products were now priced so attractively — partly owing to Chinese government subsidies — that they would soon form the backbone of next-generation telecoms networks. America’s dominance of the world’s tech infrastructure would be undermined; China’s geopolitical clout would grow.

To counter this threat, the US barred Huawei from buying advanced computer chips made with American technology. Soon, the company’s global expansion ground to a halt. Entire product lines became impossible to produce. Revenue slumped. A corporate giant faced technological asphyxiation.

Huawei discovered that, like all other Chinese companies, it was too dependent on foreigners to make the chips upon which all modern electronics depend.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil. These semiconductors are plugged into all manner of devices, from smartphones to refrigerators, that the Chinese use at home or export worldwide.

Armchair strategists theorise about China’s “Malacca Dilemma”— a reference to the main shipping channel between the Pacific and Indian oceans — and the country’s ability to gain access to supplies of oil and other commodities amid a crisis. Beijing, however, is more worried about a blockade measured in bytes rather than barrels.

China is devoting its best minds and billions of dollars to developing semiconductor technology in an attempt to free itself from America’s “chip choke”. If it succeeds, it will remake the global economy and reset the balance of military power.

Strategists in Beijing and Washington realise that all advanced tech — from machine learning to missile systems, from automated vehicles to armed drones — requires cutting-edge chips. A tiny number of companies control production.

The iPhone uses more than a dozen semiconductors, and Apple buys most off the shelf: memory chips from Japan’s Kioxia; radio frequency chips from California’s Skyworks; audio chips from Cirrus Logic in Austin, Texas.

It designs in-house the ultra-complex processors that run an iPhone’s operating system. But it can’t manufacture these chips. Nor can any company in the US, Europe, Japan, or China.

Today, Apple’s most advanced processors can be produced by only a single company in the most expensive factory in history, which on the morning of August 18, 2020, was only a couple of dozen miles off the USS Mustin’s starboard bow. No firm fabricates chips with more precision than the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

In 2020, as the world lurched between lockdowns driven by a microscopic virus, TSMC’s most advanced facility, Fab 18, was carving microscopic mazes of tiny transistors into slabs of silicon smaller than half the size of a coronavirus. TSMC replicates this process at a scale previously unparalleled in human history. In a matter of months, for Apple’s iPhone 12 model, TSMC’s facility fabricated well over one quintillion transistors — that is, a number with eighteen zeroes behind it.

The towns to the south of San Francisco, which weren’t called Silicon Valley until the 1970s. were the epicentre of the chip revolution in the 1960s because they combined scientific expertise, manufacturing know-how, government defence research budgets, and visionary business thinking. And once the chip industry took shape, it proved impossible to dislodge from Silicon Valley.

Today’s semiconductor supply chain requires components from many cities and countries, but almost every chip made still has a Silicon Valley connection or is produced with tools designed and built in California. Yet the global supply chains are geographically widespread and fragile, as Covid showed when it slammed into the world in 2020.

Big carmakers had to shut factories for weeks because they couldn’t get the semiconductors they needed. Shortages of even the simplest chips caused factory closures in dozens of industries. It seemed like a perfect image of globalisation gone wrong.

With blueprints from the Japanese-owned, UK-based company Arm, a typical chip might be designed by teams of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the US. When a design is complete, it is sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialised gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies — one Dutch, one Japanese, three Californian — without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.

If any one of the steps in the semiconductor production process is interrupted, the world’s supply of new computing power is imperiled. Given that chips are so vital, the number of companies producing them is tiny. Chips from Taiwan provide 37 per cent of the world’s new computing power each year. Two Korean firms produce 44 per cent of the world’s memory chips. Holland’s ASML builds 100 per cent of the world’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are impossible to make. Opec’s 40 per cent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison.

That Taiwan sits atop a fault line that as recently as 1999 produced an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, while Silicon Valley is on the San Andreas Fault — adds further cause for concern. Yet the seismic shift that most imperils semiconductor supply today isn’t the crash of tectonic plates but the clash of great powers.

As China and the US struggle for supremacy, both Washington and Beijing are fixated on controlling the future of computing — and, to a frightening degree, that future is dependent on a small island that Beijing considers a renegade province and America has committed to defend by force.

© Chris Miller 2022. Extracted from Chip War by Chris Miller, published by Simon & Schuster, £20

[Pelican]

"Your 24-mile line does not exist": A video of Taiwanese and Chinese destroyers facing off has shed light on what analysts call Beijing's gray-zone warfare.

See video at - https://www.facebook.com/taiwanplusnews ... 5949826927

[Pelican]

US-China Conflict: Experts Propose XQ-58 Valkyrie As ‘Best Option’ To Swarm China Before Attacking With F-22, F-35 Jets


Close on the heels of US Air For (USAF) F-15C/D fighters being withdrawn from Kadena Air Force Base (AFB) in Japan’s Okinawa, the experimental Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie has been suggested as the next credible alternative as a part of an effort to introduce drone swarms to overwhelm China.

The UCAV’s highly autonomous and runway-independent operation nullifies the threat posed by Chinese ballistic missiles that would first take out all US military and air bases in countries located in the western Pacific.

This has been anticipated in a Taiwan operation, where the US and Japan might intervene and challenge the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

By December 1, the USAF’s 18th Wing had withdrawn the first batch of F-15 Eagles from Kadena, as the C/D variant of the fighters ended nearly three decades of operations in the region.

Kadena is home to two squadrons of the USAF’s Boeing F-15Cs – the 44th Flight Squadron (Vampires) and the 67th Flight Squadron (Fighting Cocks).

Time to ‘Swarm’ Chinese With Valkyrie – US Expert
Continues at - https://eurasiantimes.com/taiwan-war-us ... -to-swarm/

Link from Tim.

[Pelican]

US Navy warship transits through Taiwan Strait

Washington: An American warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday, the US Navy said, in a move likely to anger Beijing.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon "conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit on Jan. 5 (local time) through waters where high-seas freedoms of navigation and overflight apply in accordance with international law," the Navy said in a statement.

"Chung-Hoon's transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States' commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The United States military flies, sails and operates anywhere international law allows," it added.

Continues at - https://www.geo.tv/latest/463159-us-nav ... wan-strait

LFT - Link from Tim.

[Pelican]

The U.S. Navy Submarine Force Could Sink The Chinese Fleet And Save Taiwan.

But At The Cost Of A Quarter Of Its Boats.

See - https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2 ... 3b9b283c36

LFT

[Pelican]

The state of the U.S. Navy as China builds up its naval force and threatens Taiwan

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-navy-r ... =206128675