1. China does not have the capability to invade Taiwan. Power projection is HARD, especially moving troops over waters that might not be in one's control.
2. China has the capability to destroy Taiwan merely by weight of conventional ballistic missiles. China has LOTS of short & med range ballistic missiles. Enough to swamp any missile defense on Taiwan, IIRC.
3. The closer to China one gets, the less tenable is a strike on their mainland. China has LOTS of air defense hardware.
4. Question with any commie block hardware is: How much of it works at crunch time? At Stalingrad, for every Russian tank that made it to the battlefield, one was lost along the way to mechanical breakdown.
5. An attack by USA on China would likely end in a debacle, but an attack by China on US & allies in the neighborhood likely would be a debacle for China, despite China's first move advantage.
6. China handed major world powers the knife with which to cut its throat by building the Three Gorges Dam. Take that out, and China ENDS as a major power for a few centuries.
Agree on points 1 and 2
I'm not sure about point 3. Will have to defer to those that know their SAM capabilities better than I do.
Having lived in China for 2 years, I think point 4 is VERY interesting. So very much of their civilian infrastructure is just crap. But the Chinese also possess the capability of producing high quality goods. It's all a matter of "do they" when it comes to their military. Anecdotally, if it's made in China for their domestic market, it is going to be utter crap. An order of magnitude worse than what is being sold to foreign markets by foreign firms that have actual QC controls. But my Chinese designed/built Haval econo-crossover worked a treat for 1.5 years from purchase until we left. So I'd hate to count on utter failure of their war materiel.
Point 5 - yes. Economic MAD, where the "D" stands for deprivation. And in the case of the CCP, perhaps destruction.
Point 6 - yes, taking out the Three Gorges Dam would really put the hurt on China. But for nowhere near centuries. 10-20 years maybe? There's already a move away from hydropower to nuclear in China. At this point, I bet Xi curses Jiang for creating that particular boondoggle. But the Chinese are nothing if not resilient, and to paraphrase Mao and the cockroach general in the Freak brothers kitchen: "Who cares if we lose tens of millions, there are plenty more where they came from."
