Putin thought the war was only going to be for a few days - according to research by the think tank RUSI, when Vladimir Putin began his invasion, he expected to take control of Ukraine within 10 days https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-Putin-lost-in-10-days. He couldn't pull out of the war subsequently in fear of losing control and face. Xi is an idiot, but even he can see his potential downfall, given Russia's failure.
Ukraine is still holding its own despite Russia's hypersonic missile prowess.
If you are talking about a blockade, as we've seen from Russia's invasion, Russia's world's second best navy is already powerless against Ukraine's drone attacks and missiles. And US has already warned China on a potential blockade as being very high cost.
Meatgrinder hasn't exactly worked for Russia yet. Especially if the Chinese soldiers are all sitting en mass on large, slow moving boats going across a 100 mile strait.
Unless you think the China's plan is to fill the Taiwan straits with so many dead bodies/boats so quickly, that it will create a corpse bridge for tanks to roll on.
China can't afford to throw away only sons, and have them sink into the bottom of the ocean. Families would revolt pretty quickly. As we saw from the millions of protestors in Hong Kong in 2019, and the violent protests in Shanghai in lockdown 2023, Chinese citizens are capable of grouping together in mass numbers.
China may have the factories for manufacturing, but they need materials and money to keep a war going. That's hard when they are broke, and also supporting other dictatorships, such as Russia's war effort, Iran, North Korea.
China is not going to be able to invade Taiwan, it's too old and too broke to do so. Too old as in its demographics will be 30% over 60 years old in 10 years. Too broke as in the local governments are bankrupt, and the central government is barely hanging on, so much so that it had to issue ultra long bonds in 2 of the last 3 years. Keep in mind that Chinese government differs from other governments in that the other governments source of main revenue is taxes. Whereas the Chinese government has the revenue from all the state owned enterprises which are monopolies in major industries such as banking and oil. so if the Chinese government still can't get enough revenue from those state owned enterprises to cover existing debt payments, it is pretty fucked.
It's also hard to attack an opponent, when the opponent has been preparing for a number of years, with its allies. US, Japan, Australia, India.
In case for China, there are numerous reasons, from rapid urbanisation which meant the spread of impermeable concrete surfaces and reduced natural wetlands and marshes that had in the past absorbed rain. To Soviet-era urban drainage systems of shallow buried pipes leaves cities vulnerable to waterlogging during heavy rain.
Meanwhile, in China, there are yearly flooding in major cities, where the water can't be drained through drainage due to poor planning, corruption in purported drainage fix, and now no local budget for any fixes. these floodings affect millions of Chinese each year.
For example, just in one instance, 127 million people has been affected in Guangdong province this April.
there's no reason for you to reply to maxglute. they never quote anything for reference, preferring to hallucinate things out of thin air. and they always want to have the last word, which is a sign of immaturity/insecurity.
"Russia had been forced to repeatedly establish new supply chains for acquiring chips. As sanctions disrupted existing smuggling routes, it had set up new ones, likening these outcomes to a game of “whack-a-mole”, that was frustrating for both Western governments as well as “supply-chain managers at Russian missile and drone factories”.
The biggest failure in enforcing the controls is not that Russia continues to have some success in smuggling — that’s not a surprise — but that China continues shamelessly to sell Russia so much via normal trade routes."
Huawei is basically Chinese government's military tech arm, so a few reasons might be - increased Chinese military support for Russia, cold war tension ratcheted, US view China as very weak right now and want to increase the pressure
world's biggest market by population perhaps, but out of the 1.3B population for China, 700M of them make less than $100/month. 200M makes around $1000/month, but with the recent wage cuts across industries, more like $500/month for most middle class.