All a person has to do is click around google maps on Chinese cities you never heard of and look at the road maps. It is in unbelievable what they have built in so short of time. Completely mind boggling. Our fate was sealed though once Xi Jinping came to power. An emperor with as much power as anyone in human history is going to do powerful emperor like things. If Taiwan wasn't a chip manufacturing powerhouse we wouldn't care less about their independence in the US. It would just be Hong Kong. I just don't see how defending Taiwan is ever going to work geographically though. It is a 100 miles off the mainland. From the US, Taiwan is 7,000 miles away. PLA can easily project their full power a 100 miles away. I kind of assume this is all the highest of stokes poker match and we are bluffing in the US. We will raise the pot unless China shoves all in. We have like Jack 9 off suite in this situation and won't call. WW3 will be averted but it will mark a new age. The real day of reckoning is with Japan. Hopefully that is 2050 or farther out and I am long gone.
Semiconductors, while important, it is not the end of all, and it is not their end goal. I was told that their CPU is 14nm, aka Intel 2017 chips, just matter of time the gaps narrow. We spent zillions during the cold war to do the research. Once Soviet was gone, all military know how went to private sectors. Now we can only assume Xi will invest zillions of their money into tech sectors, doesn’t care about the returns on investments. Instead of building fancy apartment buildings and ghost cities that cost hundreds of billions and no one lives, invest in technology is probably a better outcome. Never been to Taiwan, no sure other than chips and shipping, what else they make over there.