It’s either all or nothing. Taking inconsequential islands like Kinmen will incur heavy geopolitical costs with minimal gain.
I actually think there is a lot more at stake. China has had the ability to take Taiwan with extremely high confidence for years. This is reinforced by the procurement decisions of the PLA I recent years, they are not rushing to buy landing ships, fire support ships, J10s or short range low cost suicide drones. What they are buying are LHDs, carriers, 055s, J16s, J20, and high end long range drones etc. Those are not the purchase decisions of a military still worrying about being able to take an island 200km off its coast.
The problem isn’t about military power but diplomatic and economic costs.
If China moves on Taiwan, with the way the US is acting and how thoroughly European governments and the EU is compromised by US agents and useful idiots, we can expect to see the same extreme economic and diplomatic costs applied to China as was done to Russia. Sure, Chinese retaliation will cost the Americans and Europeans just as much if not more, but just because you can cost the other side more doesn’t mean what you will loose won’t still hurt.
This is why China is focused on BRI and engagement and development of the global south, so that it can ensure China’s economy isn’t isolated and crippled after it takes Taiwan and that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people can continue to improve in the years and decades after instead of stagnating or deteriorating.
I think that is the minimum requirement that needs to be met before China will proactively move on Taiwan.
The stretch objective would be to flip the EU so it at least stays neutral and out of it in any showdown between China and the US over Taiwan, both diplomatically and economically (direct European military involvement is so far fetched China would have to fuck up in a colossal way to make that even plausible).
This is also why how the war starts matters so much. If China just launches a massive sudden attack out of the blue, it would be all but impossible for Europe to stay neutral. But if the war breaks out after incessant and egregious provocations from the US, it would be a lot easier for EU countries to act in their own best interest and stay neutral instead of siding with the US.
If China takes Taiwan at the cost of the EU, then it’s Cold War 2.0 with potentially decades more of rivalry and proxy wars.
OTOH, if the war was so indisputably the fault of the US that not even the western MSM can spin it as anything else, and the EU manages to stay neutral, then there is a high chance a militarily defeated, diplomatically isolated and economically drained US will turn inwards and become isolationist if not suffer major internal violent ‘disagreements’.
That, I think is what China is playing for now, and why it is taking all these cheap shots from the US with extremely restrained and mature responses and isn’t taking the bait to act recklessly or needlessly aggressively that America desperately wants it to do.
The PLA’s military preparations are focused more on seizing the first island chain and keeping the Americans to outside the second. This allows the PLA to safeguard the Chinese coast so America cannot just sit back and spam missiles at Chinese cities and industrial centres to roll back decades of development. But that is basically well on track to be achieved soon, if not already within reach. This is why China isn’t responding like many here expects or hopes with massive hikes in Military spending.
The PLA has high confidence of being able to handle the coming fight with what they have operationally deployed and within the existing pipeline of production and procurement. It doesn’t need to go into panic mode and throw piles of money at problems hoping to magically solve them overnight.
If China actually announced a massive increase of its defence spending, that would actually be a massively worrying sign for me, because that would suggest the PLA has low or no confidence of being able to handle a possible fight with America over Taiwan now or in the near future.
But trying to magic weapons out of thin air by throwing ridiculous amounts of cash around is like trying to cram the entire syllabus the night before the exam - too little too late. Even if you had idle production capacity, it will be years before newly ordered tanks, planes and ships are ready for delivery, and years more before they are combat ready in a meaningful way.
