I hope that people are aware how biased this thread can be. To be clear, it's not like information provided here is in any way untrue. It's just that almost everybody here focus only on bad news, while ignoring positive developments. Only electricity shortage is mentioned for example, and if the Chinese gov manage to solve the issue four months later, almost nobody mentions it again. In effect, you may be surprised if the Chinese regime survives far longer than you think.
Even if you have decent reason to consider China as your enemy, I think that many people here have a tendency to fall into a trap of underestimating your enemies. The fall of Chinese regime and economy was expected by many "any day now" since decades.
There's always the possibility that people predicting collapse will be wrong; collapses in major nations very much tend to be slowly getting closer, until they abruptly all happen at once.
The thing with China (and other communist and authoritarian states) though, is that even if specific problems are dealt with, the root
cause of those problems are dealt with. And as with every other communist nation, the root problems are as follows:
1. The rejection of Truth and reality in favor of communist dogma. You must
believe when the party says there are five lights, instead of your lying eyes.
2. Mass, gross, insane corruption. This is sabotaging and degrading every single part of society.
On top of that, China has to deal with the problem of their population collapse, being geographically bottled up, and having made every single neighbor they have hostile. It's not a good place to be, and there is no sign that china is interested in changing course on
any of these key factors pushing them towards collapse, instead of doubling down.
While anybody who predicts specific dates is likely to be proven wrong, unless China undergoes
fundamental reforms, ideally getting rid of the CCP altogether, it will eventually implode.
Sure, they're still dangerous in the meanwhile, but they're also more fragile than people would like to think. Unlike the 1940's, where the Soviet Union could survive by continually retreating before the Wehrmacht until winter and over-extended supply lines stalemated the Germans, if China starts
any war that the US decides to join in on, there's only one factor that determines whether or not it emerges intact as a nation.
Can they retain control over their domestic airspace?
That they can't win an offensive war just about goes without saying. They lack the navy to project anywhere past Taiwan, and all their ground invasion targets have enormous defensive advantages. Any offensive force that fights both the nation they're pitted against,
and a US coalition, is guaranteed to be defeated barring only obscene gross incompetence on the part of coalition flag officers.
But if their air force is shot down, and their surface-to-air defenses are successfully taken out (something for which advanced long-range stealthy missiles have been designed)?
Then US and allied air power will be able to start destroying Chinese military and industrial infrastructure at will. Attempting a land invasion would be a stupid and nigh-suicidal waste of lives and money, but when you can just bomb out every military base, power plant, rail line, and road, you don't
need to invade. You can just wait for them to be
forced to surrender.
Now, it's
possible that the Chinese actually have beefy enough AA defenses to keep control of their own airspace, but the longer things go on, and shipping embargo chokes them out, the more likely that is to get ground away to nothing.
And if the CCP starts and
loses a war, odds are damned good that they'll not be able to stay in power even if they successfully sue for peace before their infrastructure is bombed out.
China is, practically speaking,
probably at the height of the power it will ever have as a communist nation. The 'gray zone' tactics it's using are where it is strongest against the US and other western powers, and as long as it can keep conflict in that area, especially with a Democrat in the White House, the longer it will be able to keep its bully-boy position in Eastern Asia. But that could implode at any time simply due to the fundamentally unsound nature of so many of their economic sectors.
