China, Taiwan and War in Asia
by David Archibald
12 August 2025
Presentation at a session on Taiwan, at the University of Western Australia, 9th August, 2025.
The chart on the slide above is produced by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It shows the sudden rise of activity in 2012 due to Xi Jinping’s accession to the Chinese throne — the drumbeat of war in Asia. Until activity on this chart goes to zero, war is coming to Asia. Tens of millions — possibly hundreds of millions — of people will die. People are advised to plan their lives on the basis that this war is coming.
It is important not to overestimate China. China has some major vulnerabilities. The biggest of them all is that Mao left a time bomb in China’s demographics. In 1959, when China had 600 million people, President Ma of Beijing University suggested to Mao that China adopt a one child policy to get its population growth under control. Mao banished Ma to the countryside and population growth was let rip until 1987. The result is that China now imports 41% of the protein its agricultural system is based on. This is seen in US and Brazilian soybean exports and Chinese imports. This close-coupled system will be broken by the coming war.
This graph details China’s food supply by grain type. What is above the dashed red line is imported. Imported soybeans provide over one third of the plant protein input to the system. That, and imported corn, provides over 40% of protein inputs to the Chinese diet. Normally a country that imports near half of its food requirements wouldn’t start a war with the countries that supply those imports. But promoting this war as a good and necessary thing requires suspending a lot of common sense. China’s food situation is why China’s war of choice could result in hundreds of millions of deaths. Beyond China, most countries in northeast Asia are net food importers, including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore.
China was initially enthusiastic about Russia’s attack on Ukraine, as it supported the ‘might is right’ narrative that is China’s excuse for its coming attack on Taiwan. Then, when the Ukraine War didn’t end in three days, it realised what that meant for China. It meant starvation. Instead of giving up on the idea of attacking Taiwan, China came up with a plausible plan for feeding itself if all the planets aligned. Firstly, they will go vegetarian for the duration of the war. Grain production will be increased by 50 million tonnes per annum. This involves sending 80,000 inspectors out into the countryside to pull up orchards and plant grain instead, in the manner that was done during the Great Leap Forward — bulldozing forests and hillsides to plant grain.
A big pointer to the political drive for the attack on Taiwan is the fate of the Chengdu green belt. After spending A$7 billion equivalent on building it, the Chengdu green belt was bulldozed soon after completion to replant the area with 250,000 tpa of grain.
We should also be aware that in defending Taiwan and Western Civilisation, we won’t be fighting the whole 1.3 billion population of China. We will only be fighting the 300 million in six coastal provinces that make stuff and trade with the world. Most of China’s wet rice production is planted by hand. Grain planted by hand means an inherently low standard of living for those planting by hand. As China can’t do without hand-planted rice production, that means that a big chunk of China’s population is locked into a low standard of living. When those same peasants are directed to slaughter their pigs and chickens to save grain for human consumption, it just means that the regime will have hundreds of millions of angry, involuntary vegetarians to deal with.
China only respects, and deals with respectfully, countries that it considers its peers. There is only one of those, the United States. All others are treated as inferiors. Most other countries do not side with China unless the politicians are paid off to do so. China’s military also doesn’t observe the basics of civility. For example, recently a PLAN vessel in the Red Sea lasered a German maritime patrol aircraft. Chinese ships lase other countries’ ships and aircraft anywhere in the world, as a matter of course. Expect atrocities from the Chinese in wartime.
With respect to the correlation of forces in Asia, there are three big factors that shrink China’s cash flow for funding a war on Taiwan. Firstly, the very poor, who are over half the population, will not be making a cash contribution to the war. They can barely feed and clothe themselves in the first instance. Secondly, exports are a big chunk of the Chinese economy and they will halt as soon as the shooting starts. Thirdly, some 30% of the Chinese economy is construction that has been funded by debt. Construction will also stop when the shooting starts.
China is a big open-air prison. The regime is now confiscating the passports of all government workers.
Politically, Xi Jinping is a hardline Maoist. That didn’t stop him from becoming wealthy through corruption. But he is jealous of Chinese billionaires who made their fortunes legitimately and he persecutes them. That is why Chinese with wealth are fleeing the country as quickly as they can. First out the door were Xi’s own relatives, with two of his siblings living in Melbourne.
The chart on the left, from the Financial Times, shows the last 20 years of startups in China. These have fallen away to nothing; Xi Jinping has killed the animal spirits in the Chinese economy. There is another sign that China peaked a decade ago and that is the chart on the right. The Chinese marriage rate is about half of what it was in 2015. China has become an unhappy kingdom under its current Great Helmsman.
The birth rate in China fell rapidly after covid hit in 2020. The relative contribution to the decline from economic factors, sociological reasons or the impact of covid on AMH levels can’t be determined from this distance. Nevertheless, China’s population is now halving every 25 years. South Korea and Japan have it worse with South Korea’s population halving every 19 years. But those countries don’t want to attack the rest of the world and kill a lot of people.
Taiwan isn’t the only option for China to attack first. China has created an option for itself in building bases to attack Vietnam. In this satellite image is a base China built 10 km north of the border with Vietnam. The plan would be to move armoured units into these warehouses and barracks at night and then launch a sudden attack. Vietnam has 40 bases in the Spratly Islands, which make a mockery of the Chinese claim to the area. As neither side will back down, this contradiction can only be resolved in blood.
China has openly stated that it will attack Japan, including stating that a joint Chinese/Russian occupying force will run the country. Japan is taking the Chinese at their word and is operating on the premise that the best time to defeat China is at the beginning of its attack on Taiwan. Japan has stated that it will be helping to defend Taiwan from day one of a Chinese attack. This in turn begs the question of a Chinese nuclear attack on Japan, as the Chinese have threatened. Japan seems rather sanguine about the prospect.
The US, Britain and France sent 331 kg of weapons-grade plutonium to Japan in the 1970s as nuclear insurance for Japan. President Obama did the dirty on Japan and made them send that plutonium back. But Japan has always operated a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility to enable it to make its own weapons-grade plutonium. In the last couple of years, Japan has sent two expeditions to Australia to secure the mineral beryl, from which the element beryllium can be extracted. Ostensibly they need beryllium for nuclear fusion research. That excuse is scientifically nonsense. The most likely reason is that they want to run a crash program on making weapons-grade plutonium (which has under 7% Pu240) in a molten salt reactor. The best neutron economy in such a reactor is achieved using a salt of 70% lithium fluoride and 30% beryllium fluoride. Possession of beryllium is like possession of heavy water in WW2. Japan is likely to start the war over Taiwan with a stock of nuclear weapons with a 50 kiloton yield. The optimum trade off between throw-weight and blast area is a 400 kiloton yield. If you are plutonium-constrained, you would likely start with 6 kg of plutonium to achieve a 20 kiloton yield, using tritium boosting to raise that to 40 kilotons and then a U238 tamper for a bit more yield.
Concentration of Chinese forces for the attack on Taiwan means that their forces will be stretched thin in defending their other bases. China has made a big emotional investment in their bases in the Spratly Islands. These would be difficult to defend at the best of times because they are 1,000 km of the nearest major Chinese forces on Hainan Island. It is going to be easy for Vietnamese forces to interdict Chinese forces sent to reinforce the Spratly Island bases; and just as easy for US forces to interdict from the east. The South China Sea can be turned into a big kill box for the PLAN and PLAAF.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry chart of Chinese baiting of Japan in the Senkakus tells us that war is coming to Asia. We, the civilised world, might as well starting holding peace conferences to guide the subsequent peace. To that end, the allies in the war against China should hold a peace conference to divide up the Chinese bases in the South China Sea. The Paracels should go back to Vietnam. The bases in the Spratlys should be divided between Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines. Predicting that this will happen will increase the chance that it will happen.
China’s invasion of Taiwan will be a difficult exercise in logistics, difficult enough to require specialised equipment. To that end, China has built nesting invasion barges that will jack up once in place and allow equipment to be transferred to shore. Such barges will be easy to target while still in port in China. The closer to Taiwan they get, the easier the targeting will become.
Australia straddles two oceans in the main theatre of operations. There are a lot of Chinese ships for us to deal with, down to 100 tonne fishing vessels. All will be armed with small arms and blinding lasers, and will be tasked with reporting on Allied force movements via the BeiDou satellite system.
Australia will be involved in China’s war of choice from day one, as a consequence of our defence treaties with Japan and the United States. Australia’s big problem is that the country is run by idiots. At the political level, global warming is promoted as the state religion. That state religion is the moral justification for shutting down Australian industry by inflicting Net Zero on us. We are supposed to be making missiles in Australia, but these are just screwdriver assembly of imported parts; just a big con job that will be useless once a war starts.
On top of all that, the people running the Australian Defence Force are mentally ill. One manifestation of that mental illness was encouraging an Army captain in Darwin to wear a dress to work. That is the photo on the right.
Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I’ve just shown you a picture of a bloke in a dress and I am saying that the entire high command is mentally ill. And he may not have full-blown gender dysphoria with its 50% suicide rate. He might have a lesser mental illness such as an autoerotic fetish about wearing dresses, lippy, and nail polish. He could still be part of an effective fighting force.
Well, have look at this and ponder the consequences. What you see here are 43 Australian Army helicopters with their rotors taken off, being prepared for burial in an unmarked grave somewhere outside Townsville. On the second-hand market they would have been worth $20 million each, with another $400 million of spares. Destroying these helicopters was a $1.3 billion exercise. They could have been given to Ukraine instead. In psychological terms, this is an example of Antisocial Personality Disorder, based in spitefulness and malicious compliance.
The high command of the Australian Defence Force is a seething mass of psychoses, some wanting to wear dresses and feel pretty, and others burying their equipment in a pit. The situation is really, really bad.
In the US military, there has been an improvement in the way things are run. Formerly run by a traitor under Biden, the US military is now run by an incompetent. Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense, swapped out E-7 Wedgetails for E-2 Hawkeyes in the latest defense budget as a supposed money-saving measure. He did this without consulting the Secretary of the Air Force, General Allvin. Congress is now undoing the damage by voting funds for E-7s and removing the funding for E-2s.
The best excuse for Hegseth is sheer incompetence, not malicious stupidity. But it means that the people running the US military know absolutely nothing about weapons systems. You can’t assume the most basic level of knowledge. And these same people will soon be running a war with China.
What is encouraging about the performance of Chinese weapons systems in the recent Indo-Pakistani aerial shootout is that the Indians shot down five Pakistani fighters and an AWACS plane for no combat losses of their own. They may have lost a plane to mechanical failure. Chinese SAM systems also failed to shoot down Indian missiles headed to Pakistani air bases.
The results of recent wars suggests that Taiwan is in a good position to defeat a Chinese invasion. Ukraine has held off a much larger invader for over three years now and that is with a land border; Taiwan has the benefit of a wide moat. Ukraine, without a navy, has driven the Russian Navy more than 900 km from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled coastline. Ukraine has also shown that you don’t need an air force to stop enemy overflight, but you do need plenty of surface-to-air missiles.
In particular, Taiwan has developed a good family of antiship cruise missiles. Pictured is the Hsiung Feng III missile — 6 metres long, 225 kg warhead, Mach 3 from a liquid-fueled ramjet, range of 400 km.
China will start its war of choice with a missile barrage followed by airborne decapitation attacks on Taiwan’s political leaders. Ukraine has shown that countries can absorb plenty of missile strikes and keep functioning. Taiwan should eat the Chinese missile strike and make sure they can shoot down all the paratroopers and helicopters on their decapitation missions. If China hasn’t won by day three, Taiwan and its friends will prevail.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare