UKH

Ok, I'd always assumed claims covid came from a lamp were the ravings of mad Trumpists, but Buden appears to be taking them seriously 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-57267729

Is there any tangible evidence for it?

In reply to MG:

There does need to be a separation between the different claims which have been made.

The escaped from a lab where it was being studied vs virus modified in lab and then escaping. The latter being more problematic for China.

I dont think there is any real evidence beyond the remarkable coincidence Wuhan is a rather long way away from the known animal reservoirs of similar viruses and it happens to have a lab researching those viruses. Plus some claims about exactly when staff fell sick.

I doubt outside of some serious investment and likely outing of intelligence sources it will ever get answered. China has a lot riding on making sure they cant be held to blame.

In reply to MG:

Many large nations have chemical and biological weapons research facilities. Many countries also have medical research facilities studying future viruses that could threaten human populations. Many countries have already had wild animal viruses make the transition to humans. Add in human error and any position is as likely as another. The addition of laboratories, wet markets etc..  likely shortened the odds of any of them. 

In reply to MG:

As I said on an unrelated thread, when you’re subject to the mushroom principle it’s good to keep an open mind.

I don’t expect I’ll ever know an honest answer to this one.

In reply to MG:

I don't recall the details but Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying's "DarkHorse" podcast has covered the lab-leak hypothesis in a lot of detail over quite a number of episodes.  The general take-away not only being that a potential lab-leak seems at least as likely as the other possibilities put forward, but the way in which it has been presented as a conspiracy (or simply unlikely) is highly questionable.  Anything from conflict of interest amongst the investigating bodies to the ethics of gain of function research on such dangerous entities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU63lsHA0y0&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEug8_VK8ve0... 

It seems impossible to ignore that the potential for it being a lab-leak seemed to have been downplayed largely because it was also Trump's standpoint.  Anything Trump said, the opposite was by default deemed to be true. Or if not, what he actually said could be relied upon to be mocked/distorted to such a degree as to appear ridiculous.  So lab-leaks were consigned to the mad, MAGA, conspiracy theory pot and anyone repeating them either likewise or made out to be a Trump supporter.

People really should be asking themselves to what degree they have allowed their political affiliations (however justified that may have seemed during Trump's presidency) to influence their reactions to certain claims.  How many other ideas have people discounted or got behind, simply because of where they were viewed in relation to Trump's standpoint?  And Trump aside, at the very least, the NBA/LeBron scandal made clear the degree to which China's financial power can influence the most outspoken of activists, or most massive of corporate/media interests, and have them adopt a China-friendly standpoint. 

Therefore it doesn't seem surprising at all that any sniff of this being a lab-leak, and therefore the blame more directly being placed on China, would be presented as unlikely.  And also not surprising that the most trusted of media outlets have proven only too happy to make out that anyone making such claims was in the deplorable category.  There was a post on Twitter a few days back comparing CNN and NY Times headlines on the lab-leak hypothesis, during and then after Trump's presidency, and the contrast is remarkable. 

In reply to RentonCooke:

Seeing as many of the ideas to which I presume you are referring are effectively unknowable to the average Joe, despite there being plenty of dodgy youtube videos that no doubt will claim otherwise, I'd say that starting with the hypothesis that if Trump backed it, it's wrong, is probably as good a strategy as we're likely to find.

In reply to john arran:

I would have thought a safer option would simply be to discard what Trump says.  A broken clock being twice right and all. 

Both sides have a role to play in this, given that the anti-Trump media could be relied upon to amplify any counter-claim to anything Trump said.  In the process, they have probably provided unwitting (or maybe not unwitting) support to China's ability to deny blame in a global catastrophe - 3.5 million deaths and likely tens of millions of long-covid cases. 

We have heaped a lot of hatred on certain politicians around the world for their negligence in combatting covid.  But we seldom level similar hatred at the politicians leading the country from whence it came, who are likely every bit as negligent, if not more.

In reply to MG:

It was hardly an outrageous conspiracy - in fact the alternatives seemed less likely to me. 

In reply to MG:

I watched a documentary a few weeks ago proposing that Covid escaped from the lab and set out quite a persuasive argument. But I don’t see that it can be proved one way or another considering the Chinese aren’t going to cooperate with any investigation and have probably destroyed any actual evidence that would point to the source.

In reply to Yanis Nayu:

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, Russians using nerve agent within a few miles of Porton Down! 

However, I'm incline to swing more towards covid19 being an accidental lab leak, contaminated staff member....

In reply to Mark Edwards:

Yes, that the virus seemed to originate in Wuhan, the lab was studying covid viruses, and that miners within a cave system died from a bat related covid in which scientists were taking in interest, makes me think it isn't implausible that it escaped from a lab which was interested in examining what had caused those deaths. With 'face' apparently being an important aspect of Chinese culture, it's not implausible that any evidence has all been destroyed too.

In reply to wintertree:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full

I've not seen the other thread, but you might find this quite interesting.

I understand that WIV stands for the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In reply to john arran:

I generally think that Donald Trump is a doofus, and that even he can be 'accidentally right' about things too. 

I guess a scientifically minded person doesn't discount a theory just because a doofus believes it.

In reply to MG:

It's worth looking into, but personally I don't trust Biden's motives any more than Trump's, no matter how less offensive the branding.

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

For me I'm not bothered, if it means western politicians use it as an excuse to trade less with China, reduce Chinese investment etc.. it's likely no bad thing long term. If they aren't making so many needless goods, they won't need to build so many coal power stations too. 

In reply to summo: There's a lot of reasons to have less to do with China, national security, security of supply (which may be misused for political aims), and it's human rights record,  which probably all countries can be hypocritical about, but at least we criticise one another - towards being better.

In reply to MG:

Very illuminating! 

In reply to Timmd:

I said nothing about discounting anything, an of course even dead clocks are accidentally right occasionally. I merely pointed out that, in the absence of reliable evidence either way, taking an opposing view to that espoused by the orange one would appear to be stacking the odds of being correct in your favour.

In reply to summo:

Sure, though the ethics of China's pirate economics aside as a separate, and undeniable, issue for the moment, do you think a conclusion that the virus came from a Wuhan lab will make any difference? 

China's government certainly needs accountability, no question there - plus a whole range of other issues that all big modern states should be held to account for (whether they all are or not being another matter) - but I'm not seeing how this potential conclusion would have any real effect on trade from China's side at either a government or popular level.

I see this mostly as part of a process to turn China from the competition to the enemy. I work somewhat in circles that have long term relations with China and there's no talk of reeling in trade. 

In reply to summo:

Not sure if this smacks more of western imperialism or simple racism. 

In reply to Blanche DuBois:

Just better everything. Offshoring all the bad things by letting China do it for the west doesn't make them go away. 

It's not racist, there are Asian countries like South Korea with a much better environmental record, workers rights etc.  We can offshore manufacturing to places like that. It won't be as cheap as China, so we'll need to lower our own expectations in life, but it's arguably better than fuelling the Chinese regime. 

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

Personally, I think it's too late, most companies have too much Chinese component manufacture, China has bought up so many western companies already, they've got levers in many countries as they own some of that governments debt, their belt and bridges project is expanding all the time. They've even been cunningly getting us to teach them everything we know through exchange projects, university placements etc.  They've played the long game so so well. 

China pulls the strings in one way or another. 10-15years ago the west could have done something, but now we are China dependent. Things like rare earth metals; if we don't stay on china's side, the west's tech advances would grind to a halt, unless we mined places like Greenland to death.

The big question once China isn't just slightly ahead of the USA, but clearly the new super power in all respects, what will it do. 

In reply to john arran:

Stopped clock....

In reply to summo:

Yes, I think similar to that in many ways. To my mind though, having spent a lot of time in China over the last 25 years, and not just in the easy bits like Shanghai and the seaboard, is that 'China vs the rest of us' is a fabrication, and that the rise and expansion of China has just been the rise and expansion of all of us with less division between the two as populism presents. Hence 'the competition becoming the enemy'.

Much, much of China's expansion has been into emerging or disparate markets and places the other large economies have ignored, and they have grown in affluence both because of and in hand with places like Iran, Central Asia and South Asia - long standing neighbours - when these places were shrugged off or blacklisted by the west. China mopped up a huge amount of the former Soviet Union which has gone on to become significant hydrocarbon suppliers and are cashing in now.

The idea that the west could have averted this 10-15 years back I think never was a reality. Anyone who cared knew the way it was going and willingly sided with the decisions of the day. I was in the thick of China then and the die was cast well before Xi ever got to power. To rise to the economy they have now wasn't just a matter of everyone getting an iphone and leaf blower, they also got there from everyone getting sanitation, education and opportunity as well. It's a twisted fact of history that for as terrible (in the fullest extent of the word) as the CCP is, no other system has raised as many from poverty, let alone in such a short timeline.

The hope to my mind is with the emerging kids in China. I spent a fair bit of time amongst the 25-35 year olds and they are an amazing lot, even the kids out in the sticks are amazingly switched on and the further you get from Beijing the less they care for the old guard of Xi etc. The feel that the power generation there is loosing hold is incredibly strong and must terrify the authorities.

Yes, our universities taught these kids western ideas that have come back to confront us, but we also taught them how to subvert and maybe ultimately confront their own government in a way the 80's students can be proud of. Popular western media likes to show China as a closed off totalitarian state, but these people have a 3000 year history of subverting their own leaders - every kid I know has full internet access, is on facebook, reading what we do etc. It will of course be their own version of all that, but fck it's going to be big.

Covid, yeah maybe it is a CCP plot, but any changes made in changing course of the enormous ship that China is - a fifth of all of us - will come with those inside it. The long game you mention is exactly it.

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

I'd agree, we've grown off the back of China, but it might still come back to bite us. Modern tech, the Internet will likely prevent the next generation of Chinese being misled, steered etc.. it's just a question of what the 25-30yr olds want to do when they pull all the strings globally. The west has a young educated broad minded generation too, but still gets dragged off to wars it didn't want or votes in idiots like trump. 

In reply to summo:

Yes all so true. Could well take much longer than just the one gen, and they have their own unique issues to deal with. They still live fully with the gen that were the Cultural Revolution well in control, the shock waves are still everywhere. Moving beyond that will be another huge shift for the global population.

Dark as it is, they won't though make the mistake of voting for a Trump. That sort of democracy isn't on the radar.

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

It'll end in tears. China has the companies that manufactures the components, it owns many western companies that it's hoovered up over the years, it just left them with their original name and brand, it controls western employment. It controls much of the credit that enables people and states to buy these goods. It then owns much of the infrastructure which delivers the goods. We are becoming slaves to China, without knowing it, at some point it will have sucked all the knowledge, wealth and resources from us and will turn the taps off. 

In reply to summo:

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

I think it remains true in China, and Hong Kong.

In reply to summo:

Maybe.

As yet China's extension globally has had a wide spectrum of results, the vast majority of their influence being resource driven, not ideological. In fact the exporting of their brand of politics has never been a big thing, even into the bastard child of NK or truly weakened states like Laos. If anything, China has gone into states with worse systems and said nothing in return for the resources. HK & Taiwan are interesting obviously, and probably too different to lump into my convenient sentence together. CCP influence there is a complex interrelation with several other Sinocentric issues, not least local groups happy to sell HK and to a lesser extent Taiwan out from the inside.

As yet - it may change - China's coercion of other states has been mostly a matter of controlling resource supplies. They have been very good at filling all the gaps the western model of supply control hadn't gone into, and with a market economy foreseeably ever-expanding, can plan pretty confidently they can continue doing so - something the US can't. It's easy to see why mega-investors and true global operators buy into it, the wobbly factors like partisan politics, small wars, privatization etc that can upend other countries apply much less to China.

Will China one day hold the world hostage using it's influence? Hard to say, I think, as there's no real precedence from them yet even in places they easily could do it now. I don't think they are aiming for British-style or US-style hegemony because they don't export their ideology or even brands really, but I do think they exploit the uncertainty that comes from mid-sized states when it comes to choosing trade relationships. To o with your assertion; I don't think we will become slaves to China, but I do think we all subcontract to them.

In reply to MG:

If you enjoy facts from people who know what they are talking about (i.e went to Wuhan and the lab in question) then you should listen to This Week In Virology. Basically, to paraphrase, the whole lab theory is bollocks (I think they said very, very unlikely), but it’s shot through with inaccuracies and ‘intelligence evidence’ is hearsay and despite numerous requests for some evidence nothing has been provided.

This is not to defend China in any way for its human rights abuse, or as a strategic threat, but the lab theory is a political distraction from finding the actual source of Covid. 

In reply to George Ormerod:

Virologists are not to be trusted, esp. Peter Daszak

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-op...

In reply to MG:

Interesting evidence in a soon to be released paper :

“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row,” Dalgleish told the Daily Mail. “The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629563/Chinese-scientists-created...

In reply to magma:

But we can artificially break the laws of physics...?

In reply to captain paranoia:

I agree- one of the less convincing quotes from the article- I'm sure the paper is more nuanced. The biophysics approach is worth exploring given lack of other data. Maybe that's what Biden needs the supercomputers for?

In reply to MG:

WHO inspector Peter Daszak explains how easy it is to create more infective viruses in (level 2) labs (28min+) shortly before pandemic; youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w&

In reply to MG:

I don't know of any evidence but it would be very easy to fabricate a motive.

In reply to broken spectre:

Very much this.

18 months on there's more known on many fronts, including both popular and agency appetite to pursue ideas. Chinese bio-warfare project or not, when so many accept stuff like Q and xeno-paranoia just the mention of it could sway large events.

In reply to broken spectre:

There are many reasons why China might investigate viruses in animals that could make the leap to humans. However there are no real motives for a deliberate release. Many folk seem to merge the two together. 

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

I would bet money this has absolutely nothing to do with bio weapons.  One thing the Chinse Government is not is stupid.  If they were going to have a lab to mutate dangerous viruses into bioweapons they would stick it in a military base in a desert miles from anywhere.   It is a big country, they have absolutely no need to do things like that in the middle of a city.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Yes, good points. It may just be simple bio-med stuff as pointed up thread. I don't know Wuhan very well, but many cities in China have hi-tech and science-oriented satellite cities that have sprung up in the last 10-20 years and then been enveloped by the larger urban spread (probably intentional). Wuhan, as three old cities with numerous satellites that has formed a massive mega-city and is a defacto capital of inland China, would have all sorts of things.

In reply to George Ormerod:

The mail article is full of stuff to persuade the layman of its scientific plausibility.  Would the mail exclusively be likely to be where this would first see the light of day if it were a reputable paper?

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

If you’re going to do this, the safety comes not from geographic isolation but the design of the lab and surrounding processes.  If, for example, someone got unknowingly infected in your desert lab with a slow developing, pre-symtomatically infectious virus that was like a bad cold for them, they could go home a week later none the wiser and pass if on to relatives....

If they caught Ebola and became ill, they’d have to go to a medical facility.  The quality of isolation in patient transport and at the medical facility determines the spread, not the geographic isolation.  Staff interact and staff have families, friends and acquaintances.   I suspect staff working in isolated desert facilities will make the most of “shore leave”, perhaps that could raise - not lower the risk.

Geographic isolation is probably one of the smaller factors - it might save you from some of the incidents that follow what should be an unimaginable failure in protocols and systems.  

One of the newest BSL-4 labs in the UK was to be bully next to the Eurostar terminal at Kings Cross St Pancras.  All things considered I’d still rather it was in a desert...

There’s some physics stuff that can go out in the desert.  As we start building larger and longer anti-matter storage experiments, that can go somewhere far away in space... edit: chemical stuff can go in the desert but I’d rather everyone just agreed to stop doing it.

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

 > The hope to my mind is with the emerging kids in China. I spent a fair bit of time amongst the 25-35 year olds and they are an amazing lot, even the kids out in the sticks are amazingly switched on and the further you get from Beijing the less they care for the old guard of Xi etc. The feel that the power generation there is loosing hold is incredibly strong and must terrify the authorities.

Yes, our universities taught these kids western ideas that have come back to confront us, but we also taught them how to subvert and maybe ultimately confront their own government in a way the 80's students can be proud of. Popular western media likes to show China as a closed off totalitarian state, but these people have a 3000 year history of subverting their own leaders - every kid I know has full internet access, is on facebook, reading what we do etc. It will of course be their own version of all that, but fck it's going to be big. <

I hope you're right. However, largely due to use of modern technology, the Chinese government will also increasingly be able to accomplish surveillance and thus control of its own population. This may make it far less likely that internal subversion can be successful,

In reply to oldie:

From my observations over 25 years, the government there has actually lost a huge amount of it's eye on the population. I agree the efforts to oversee them have astronomical proportions, but they're not keeping ahead of the kids despite trying. As bad a reputation as China has, personal freedom is orders of magnitude more now than it was even 10 years ago, and rolling that back I personally think is impossible.

I think the writing's on the wall for the government there, but it won't go quietly and there will always be people siding with the bastards on top, but i think it's happening as we watch and the best we can do is connect with the kids on social media, if anything just for the solidarity. 

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

Modern tech hasn't stopped them taking full control of Hong Kong. 

In reply to summo:

For sure, but the HK government sold out their own people there. I've not spent much time in HK for a few years, but it appears things are almost freer in mainland than in HK in some ways.

In reply to summo:

Modern tech is a wet dream for state surveillance - people share (and over share), locations are tracked but mainly reduced cost of labour compared to steaming open envelopes and transcribing phone call recordings means it can be indiscriminate rather than targeting terrorists etc

In reply to wintertree:

They don't get to go home.   They live in a barracks on the base for a tour of duty and they get confined to the base after their tour is over until the authorities are sure they aren't infected.   That's what they did with the medical staff flown in from other parts of China to man the hospital they built in Wuhan.   If they do that in a civilian fever hospital with civilian doctors and nurses I'm pretty sure they would do even more with military personnel assigned to a secret weapons program.

Yeah - in China?  More likely to get shot in the head if you caught some bioengineered doomsday bug.

Have these clowns never watched Resident Evil?  Of course not.   Probably got a donation from Umbrella Corporation for Boris's flat.

In reply to Removed Userwaitout:

I'm less sanguine but recall making the same comments maybe 15-20 years ago, how China was "safe" as it showed no evidence of territorial ambitions.  However, they have been building naval capacity equivalent to the entire French flotilla, every year for a decade - or some ridiculous figure like that, and from space to tech overtaking seems just a few years away.  Xi supposedly claimed he will "resolve" the Taiwan issue in his premiership, and based on how Hong Kong is going, I suspect it will be done bluntly.  Not helped by the fact that a) in some surveys ~50% of Taiwanese of fighting age say they would not resist an invasion and b) potential lack of US interest in a China V Taiwan war (a war which the longer China waits, the more likelihood they have of winning). An interesting time and possibly the next powderkeg after the Middle East - I'm sure I've heard some talk of pivots to Asia for the US military etc.

It occurred to me however that there may be a meta-narrative to the sudden switch in favour of the lab-leak hypothesis.  If I were suspicious of the degree to which the media can be influenced and have a narrative set for it, I would potentially assume the sub-text from NATO/allied nations has been "we won't make a song and dance about COVID, and will go along with any old wet-market story....so long as you step back from HK/Taiwan/etc...and if you don't, we're going to change the narrative, and have you become country non-grata due to your cover-up".  Got to be a novel in that - cold-war style, but virtual, mediated, sabre-rattling in the Twitter/blogosphere age, where a person or country's ability to wage and win war is as much predicated on their cultural and media profile as it is by productive capacity and armarments.

In reply to RentonCooke:

Perhaps, though looking at China through a euro-centric or US-centric lens is half the problem, including the fallacies surrounding territorial claims and gains. Modern China (post-concessions) has been in a constant state of territorial unrest, coming and going with their ability to negotiate with their neighbours, as dependent on the other as on China itself.

I agree fully that evaporating interest (and economics) in protecting Taiwan is a big player, with many parts to that puzzle including Japan's significant role in the scenario. That's been an ongoing thing for a while now, with Xi knowing the Democrat's in the US have a weak history with Taiwanese leadership to exploit. Even just yesterday Japan stirred the mix with a seemingly politicized vaccine deal with Taiwan courtesy of the highly dubious Japanese leadership that China is rightfully unhappy towards (and no one else seems to to comment on). The further Taiwan's economy moves from production, the less useful it is to those who may protect. It won't surprise me if eventually it becomes like Ukraine; not good, but not our problem either.

Personally I think China has too many problems on too many fronts to sink everything into a single confrontation - just yet. Very little of the countries borders are well defined or free of unrest, and big action on Taiwan risks diversions from elsewhere. As you say, the long game played by constant probing to degrade Taiwan's own position whilst international support stagnates (or gets itself diverted elsewhere) seems to be the game here. The costs of invading, holding and defending Taiwan may be avoidable with just waiting - and from the way Xi has fingered the ways for him to retain power, probably will be on his watch.

In reply to RentonCooke:

Taiwan is going nowhere and the reason is that it has captured global chip manufacturing.   TSMC is the most strategically important chip manufacturer in the world and is now spending $30Bn per year on capital equipment,

https://www.eetasia.com/tsmc-raises-capital-budget-to-30b/

You would be hard pressed to find any electronic device which doesn't have at least one chip manufactured by TSMC in it.   They are a fab for most of the brand name chip companies people have heard of - including Intel.    If Taiwan gets in a war TSMC will stop making chips and nobody will be able to make any complex electronic products for years while the supply chain sorts itself out and chip companies in other countries desperately try and find at least 100 billion dollars for new equipment and factories and to recreate the skills of the TSMC workforce and the Taiwanese suppliers to TSMC.

The Biden administration noticed this and started to think about the US having its own chip manufacturing supply chain and being less dependent on Taiwan - and then the industry told him how much it would cost and how long it would take.   

China can't attack Taiwan without crippling its own industry and the US can't afford not to protect Taiwan.

China could flatten Taiwan's industrial base with missiles and in the process it would destroy a its own economy,   Invading Taiwan is never going to work, they'd be sending large and slow troop carrying ships and planes against guided missiles.  

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Give it 10 years that is when the military reckons that China will go for it. . China  may catch up on the chip issue anyway by then so what you say is less of an issue. 

it will still be difficult to do . It’s 80 miles apart  and any sea invasion will be fraught and not easy  .

In reply to RentonCooke:

In space, it looks to me like we're less than a year away from sealing unchallenged US dominance of space.  SpaceX are so incredibly far ahead of anyone else, and their nearest challengers in terms of sheer capacity to orbit and cost/kg to orbit are US based.

Once someone built a castle on a hill, it used to be very difficult for others to take it over.  Space is the ultimate hill.

I'll take US dominance in space over Chinese dominance in space, but I don't think it's a particularly good development.

In reply to neilh:

Nope.

This is driven by Moore's second law: "the cost of a chip fabrication plant doubles every 4 years."

I actually heard Gordon Moore give the talk on his laws at Caltech many years ago and he had an interesting side comment  "never trust a man who plots money on a log scale."

What is happening is we are reaching the semiconductor end-game because the cost has forced almost everybody out.  Every generation the factories get more expensive, they can make far more chips, there are less of them and there are fewer companies able to stay in the game.   It is like Highlander.   Intel, Samsung and TSMC are the only people still playing the game and Intel is starting to subcontract to TSMC and to get into the subcontracting game itself.

China isn't anywhere on leading edge chip manufacturing and it isn't going to be in 10 years. 

I would say the most likely scenario for ten years out and two more doublings of fab cost would be TSMC and Intel merging or forming a joint venture and operating two mega fabs, one in Taiwan and one in the US.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

I am not sure that China will worry about it anyway.  They want Taiwan under their wings.   

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

I read somewhere recently that China is already ramping up 14 and 28nm production, more new plants coming online next year. I wouldn't under estimate them. 

In reply to summo:

That's two or three process generations behind.  It is nowhere.

Right now to stay in the leading edge silicon fab game you've got to be spending $30billion a year.

Ten years from now it will be $120 billion a year.

This isn't about who is going to get into the game it is about who's going to be next to drop out.

In reply to neilh:

Of course China will worry about it.

If you look at *any* device with electronics content it will almost certainly have multiple chips which were made in Taiwan. Very few things don't have electronics in them these days.

That kind of manufacturing is not going to keep running during a war and it will not be easy to get going again after one.

If it stops the world will grind to a halt, starting with China because China makes so many things.  All those factories will stop if they can't get chips from Taiwan.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

I can't argue with anything you say about the difficulty of entering the industry as I know very little about it. However it seems incredible to me that a place the size of Taiwan could maintain a leading position in something whilst China could not. That is surely unsustainable in the medium term. I would expect that China would find a way to acquire the necessary knowledge and resource from the Taiwanese. If they were unable to do that, unable to catch up and saw it as a major risk, then it's just another major motivation to annex the place, not a motivation against as you previously argued. Short term disruption for long term gain?

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

China will achieve it's goals without firing a shot, it might take 5, 10, 50 years, but it'll get there.