It looks like TSMC is going to make the next generation of 5 nm GPU chips, so it's good news for us gamers that maybe it's practically impossible for China to invade Taiwan.

The Hill:

Thirty seconds over Taiwan

" ... China could obliterate Taiwan with missile attacks. It can work to destabilize the regime from within. It can use economic sanctions and financial warfare to force Taipei to accept annexation. And it could impose an economic blockade. It cannot, however, invade."

"Why? A historical example provides a clue. In mid 1944, at the height of the Allied offensive against Japan, the U.S. was debating whether to invade the Philippines or Taiwan. Dubbed Operation Causeway, the Taiwan option called for 400,000 soldiers and Marines and 4,000 ships arrayed against 30,000 Japanese troops, a force almost double the Normandy landings. China will never have that capability."

But look at what Graham Thomas actually writes:

Operation Causeway

" ... It was thought that it would take three months for the whole island would be under Allied control." (...)

"However the more the plan was examined the more it was realised that this would be a very different battleground to the flat plains of northern France, with air support based in England just a few miles away, and the ability for tanks to move fast and wide against the German forces."

"Formosa [Taiwan] would have been a very different proposition for a number of reasons including:"

• "the mountainous terrain where the Japanese could have dug in.

• the ability for the Japanese to undertake a guerrilla war from the foothills before disappearing back into the heavy jungle.

• a belief that the intensity of the Japanese defence of Taiwan would, have matched the savage fighting seen in earlier Pacific campaigns.

• as Formosa had not suffered much bombing it was assumed that Japanese morale would be high.

• the Japanese occupation of Formosa had lasted for several decades and they had been able to convince the local population that this was too their benefit. This meant they had additional manpower to call upon if an invasion had taken place.

• the ability to easily reinforce troops and supplies from Japan whereas the U.S. would have no nearby bases and their supply lines would have been unreliable." (...)

"Although it is highly likely that the Allied forces would have eventually taken Formosa, it was calculated that this would be at the cost of over 150,000 Allied casualties not counting the number of civilians that would have been killed and wounded."

Modern people in progressive Taiwan are so hedonistic and woke that they are not going to fight like the Japanese during WW2. But they will fight, bet on that.

China can bomb to pieces some of the fighting morale in Taiwan, but terror bombing like in Dresden will backfire globally in such a degree that it can start WW3.

If you look at the map you will notice that the nearest relative "big" island northeast of Taiwan (in the direction of American forces in Okinawa) is almost as far away from Taiwan as China is distanced from the western side of Taiwan.

There are also a couple of islands in the Taiwan Strait which can be used by PLA.

If PLAN got 10,000 small boats, each much carry 40 men (and women?) in order to transport 400,000 soldiers to the relatively few useful landing areas on the coast of Taiwan.

China will also use large ships, including ferries and cruise ships maybe. They can be more easily destroyed however, depending on China's electronic jamming capabilities in the Taiwan Strait.

If mainland China decides to attack it's probably going to be one hell of a battle, especially if Taiwan gets a few more extra years to remake itself as a supersized "porcupine".

But a war is going to hit the economy of average people in the West.

Bloomberg:

Could Taiwan Be the Next Crisis That Delays Your Retirement?

"Money managers and analysts are now mapping out potential war scenarios. An official notice last month from authorities in Beijing  on stockpiling food ahead of the winter holidays was interpreted by Chinese traders as a sign of imminent conflict with Taiwan. In the U.S., Taiwan was such a hot topic among institutional investors that even JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon waded into the politics; he talked about the political unpopularity of "body bags" in a speech in Boston last week in remarks that prompted an apology for his joking about the longevity of the Communist Party."

"But a threshold problem for U.S. financiers and their clients is that they don't quite realize the extent of their exposure to China or how politically sensitive their assets can be. Data from the Treasury Department, for instance, tell them that they had $154 billion of Chinese shares as of 2017. But that's a profound understatement. The actual amount would be 4 1/2 times the official figure (about $700 billion) because many publicly listed Chinese companies, including Jack Ma's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., were incorporated in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. These are counted as non-Chinese by the Treasury."

"Similarly, a pension fund that aims to grow its assets inevitably has a lot of China exposure too. Of the top 10 largest state public pension funds, all have allocated money to track global indexes that have exposure to the country. In the past two decades, China overtook Taiwan and then South Korea as the biggest component, at about one-third, of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. It now accounts for about 11% in the MSCI All-Country World Index." (...)

"In the event of a PLA invasion, the sanctions list Washington D.C. has placed on Chinese companies will only broaden beyond the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. and China Mobile Ltd. U.S. pension funds will be forced to sell their holdings, possibly incurring losses in tens of billions of dollars."