I've served in Taiwan for years as a missionary and I see a lot of current posts, if you'd like to know more about the country from an actual local. Drop a question! I can't promise I'll answer quickly as our timezone is very different but I'd like to clarify things as it's important to be accurate with Taiwan!
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (10)
sorted by:
How's Taiwan reacting to rumblings of China's likely invasion?
People here are nervous. But the status quo hasn't really changed. I think the fear (And this is a culture that tends to give into fear quickly) is that China will do something irrational or painful. They're more nervous than I've seen in my decade or so living and coming to Taiwan but I do think that they're also living life as they always have. Over here many countries have had entire generations living under martial law or fear of invasion (Like Korea for instance just always having potential invasion from the north). After awhile it's not really that terrifying and most of the news covering it (Like talking about planes entering the ADIZ) tends to ignore that the ADIZe is pretty far out to sea.
And everyone has ethnic ties! They still do business with relatives and family in China, they travel back and forth, it's really a sort of strange situation with many people being intrinsically tied to China and yet constantly bullied by the CCP.
In my opinion (I put a video at the bottom on why) we are pretty well insulated from invasion due to the worldwide reliance on tech from Taiwan.
An invasion would only occur if China thought it was better to invade and destroy it's economy, military, and reputation internationally. That doesn't mean it's impossible but I would assume that an invasion would probably occur out of desperation to maintain political control or stave off famine than a strategic political decision like having Taiwan as a territory.
The biggest issue is in my opinion, keeping Taiwan from moving out of the global supply chain into a lesser role. Once China and the world no longer relies on Taiwan they sort of have a green light to attempt an invasion. I still think that'd be ridiculous though without a much more advanced and prepared military. In fact they tried equipping ferry's as troop transports last year. It's just impossible to send the 400,000 needed soldiers to invade quickly enough and safely enough with China's current untested military.
The video shows the semiconductor argument,
https://youtu.be/G6rWgeirQHI