So if the PRC attempts to invade Taiwan, and it plays out like I've run it, what then.
It's hard to say. The government seems firmly entrenched, but then nearly ever authoritarian government does until it is not.
The Chinese economy is really not in as good of shape as it casually seems from the outside. A war with the west, even a victorious one, would wreck it. A lost war would be a national embarrassment and the end of decades of work with failure. Chinese regimes that are embarrassed have historically not lasted, even though the country has never manged to be democratic. It'd meet with massive internal discontent, aided by massive unemployment.
Even a victorious war, however, may not bring a victorious peace.
China's counting on its continued role as a global exporter. . . the role the US occupied in the world's economy following World War One and up until the 1970s, and which the British had occupied before that. China's underlying belief is based on hubris, it's too important to be disregarded.
Those positions, the economic dominance of the US and UK, were, moreover, occupied under conditions in which trade tended to be more closed, and economies developed and changed much more slowly. And they also existed under conditions in which the US, and the UK before it, retained a large native laboring class. We still have that class, but its nothing like it was before. Much of it has moved into the quasi white collar middle class, and even keeping it in that position has become a matter of national policy to the point of subsidization, if necessary.
Nobody can really fully determine how this would play out. History is our only guide, really. But the long term history of nation's on China's path, that of Imperial Germany, or for that matter Nazi Germany, has not tended to be a happy one.
Hubris turns out to be a bad basis for making policy. Hubris lead Hitler eventually into the Soviet Union. . . hubris lead Stalin to present a final set of demands to Hitler in 1940 that couldn't realistically be granted in exchange for the USSR becoming a Germany ally.
None of which will likely deter them from acting. That lesson, for autocratic states, never seems to be learned.
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