2027, the Year of Global Existential Risk

(Late last year, Rick, a subscriber, asked if I could break down and compare the militaries of the US and China. What follows is my response to his question - the context being that of the two superpowers coming to blows over their most likely point of friction, Taiwan.

If you’ve got something you’d like me to look into and write about, leave a comment at the end of this essay.)

2027 is the year many China watchers believe that Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), has earmarked for a tilt at Taiwan, the independent island democracy he considers a renegade province.

While it’s impossible to predict how US President Trump (who has described the Chinese leader as “a brilliant guy”) will react to such aggression if he believes it’s in America’s interests to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf, expect a major superpower conflict that will drag many nations into this existential crisis.

Why 2027? Because the planets for such a venture will finally align in China’s favor while the years beyond it — at least beyond 2030 — turn the odds markedly against a successful outcome.

There is an alternative view that China is not and never has been an expansionist power and that, therefore, Beijing’s desire to conquer the island nation will only happen by peaceful means. If this is you, you’re simply not reading the tea leaves. Xi has tested the world’s appetite for bad behavior with a brutal ongoing campaign against the Uyghurs, which all but fringe human rights dwellers have largely ignored. Even the Muslim world has largely ignored it. There’s the forced annexation of Tibet, the border battles with India in the Ladakh region, the swift and heavy-handed end to accepted norms of freedom in Hong Kong/Macau, and the militarization of a vast swath of the South China Sea (more on that to come).

China the cuddly Panda? Hardly.

---

He will want to secure his legacy — the leader who achieved what even Chairman Mao couldn’t — to not only unify China but achieve it within his lifetime and enjoy as many years as possible basking in the glory of that achievement

---

Xi Jinping is an autocrat who has swept aside the PRC’s constitutional term limits for presidents. He’s the first to have a third five-year term, and he’s primed for a fourth, which will begin in 2027. The rationale for his continuing leadership is the unification of China. He has secured Hong Kong and Macau in the fold — Taiwan is outstanding. Claiming the aberrant territory to be his numero uno priority, Xi has said, “We will never promise to renounce the use of force and reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.”

Xi Jinping is 71 years of age. The average life expectancy of a man in China is 78. Yes, the president will have the very best health care at his disposal and will most likely live well beyond the average age for a Chinese male to kick the bucket, but Xi is both pragmatic and arrogant. He will want to secure his legacy — the leader who achieved what even Chairman Mao couldn’t — to not only unify China but achieve it within his lifetime and enjoy as many years as possible basking in the glory of that achievement.

Xi has been working towards the fulfillment of his dream from the get-go, embarking on the modernization and expansion of the PRC’s military. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has the world’s largest standing army, with 2 million men at arms and another half million reservists. Traditionally given to the defense of China’s vast territory and borders, the PLA is today nearing parity with the United States in terms of the technology at its command – tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, man-portable and other missiles, drones, and so forth.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) now commands the world’s largest fleet of warships following a concerted building program over the last 12 years. True, it’s not technically a “blue water” navy, with many of its warships, smaller destroyers, and frigates better suited to coastal patrols. But that, too, is changing, with new vessels leaving the yards every year. The PLAN currently operates two (Soviet era) aircraft carriers modeled on the Russian carrier that’s forever breaking down (and embarrassingly only ever leaves port accompanied by a tugboat), the Admiral Kuznetsov. However, a new locally designed carrier, the Fujian, is currently undergoing sea trials, and there’s a fourth carrier, rumored to be nuclear-powered, soon to be revealed.

The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is also, as you’d expect, equally massive. Its inventory includes over 1900 fighter jets. Around 1300 of these are Soviet-era types like the Su-30 and Su-35, or copies of Soviet fighters such as the J-11, but 200 or so are the locally designed and built fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 fighter believed to possess genuine stealth characteristics and armed with more than capable “beyond visual range” weapons. And very recently, towards the end of December, China exhibited the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft, the J-35, in the skies over Chengdu, stealing a march on the American Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter program, which has only just recently been parked due to cost concerns.

The point to make here after this blizzard of acronyms, designations, and numbers is that China is clearly and determinably working towards parity with the US military in all areas and has been on this march for well more than a decade. 2027 is the year in which it will attain this goal. And all of this military power will reside in the hands of Xi Jinping. Not only is he the president, but he’s also General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Xi commands centralized power not seen since the days of Mao Zedong. It’s also fair to say that he channels the arrogance of a nation that has enjoyed thousands of years of continuous civilization. What Xi wants, he expects to get.

---

China is clearly and determinably working towards parity with the US military in all areas and has been on this march for well more than a decade

---

A further point to note is that autocracies thrive on celebrating dates that mark significant milestones in their establishment as a means of reinforcing their claims to legitimacy. Russia’s Putin suffers from this, and so does Xi’s China. The year 2027 marks the centennial of the Nanchang Uprising and the formation of the People’s Liberation Army. What better way to celebrate the military’s 100^th birthday than to bag Taiwan?

While there’s a solid case for keeping an eye on 2027, there’s an equally strong case for Xi not wanting to wait too much beyond it. He has said that China will be united – come hell or high water – by 2049, the Centennial of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. But, of course, if Xi’s not dead by then, he’ll be 95 years of age and a bit long in the tooth to fully embrace the celebrations.

More importantly, beyond 2030, China’s demographic issues will be front and center. In recent surveys, its population has actually declined for the first time in China’s modern history. This is not helped by statistics that reveal that it also has the world’s fastest-aging population. Indeed, at the current rate, fully 28% of the PRC’s population will be over 60 years of age by 2040 — 402 million people. That will place an enormous burden on a country whose economic and military strengths depend on its size and scale. The One Child policy, in force from 1979 to 2015, enacted to curb China’s rampant population growth, has left a sizeable demographic sinkhole that’s about to swallow those very strengths.

In short, much beyond 2030, staffing the military and funding it at present levels will come under real strain.

Realizing this, the PLA, PLAN, and the PLAAF have been relentlessly drilling for an invasion that will dwarf D-Day when it ultimately happens, and happen it will. The mainland sends large numbers of military aircraft into Taiwan’s airspace on an almost daily basis, sails its navy out to practice blockading the island, conducts cyber-attacks, co-ordinates force deployment with a fleet of massive commercial vessels that will also spearhead its logistics, and regularly fires ballistic missiles over the island just in case there’s any misunderstanding about the maneuvers. And the size and scale of these incursions just get bigger and more complex with each passing year. Their primary purpose is three-fold.

1. Practice for the day this is no longer practice

2. Probe Taiwan’s defenses (light up its radars so that they know where they are and aren’t)

3. Perform these maneuvers so often that they numb Taiwan’s readiness – “Oh, don’t worry about all those ships and planes heading our way; it’s just another drill.” Until it’s not

Of course, the other big reason why China can’t wait till 2049 to achieve its main aim is that Taiwan, along with the United States and its allies like Japan and the Philippines, aren’t sitting around flipping cards into a hat while China’s dragon sharpens its teeth.

Taiwan has been buying weapons like a teenager with Daddy’s credit card on Black Friday. It’s splurging USD$15bn on American weapons in 2025 – anti-ship and air defense missiles (including 400 Patriot missiles), F-35 fighters, main battle tanks, and no less than four US Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers equipped with the Aegis combat system, arguably the world’s most advanced missile defense system. This follows on from USD$21bn spent on weapons in Trump’s first term and USD$7bn during President Biden’s four years in office. Taiwan aims to prove that it’s serious about its defense. (And nothing impresses Trump more than dollars spent by foreigners on American products.)

So…what’s so important about Taiwan that the world should risk a hot war between the world’s only two nuclear-armed superpowers over its defense? The usual — money and power.

Taiwan produces 68% of the world’s semiconductors, the computer chips that make modern technology possible – everything from smartphones and fridges to missiles and EVs. Control over the production of this by one superpower is a sovereign risk to the other. And given that China holds a monopoly over the processing of a suite of rare earth metals, the other key ingredient in virtually every product that contains a computer chip and a battery, ending Taiwan’s autonomy would put every technological ace in Xi’s hand. At the very least, losing Taiwan to China would instantly relegate America to being an also-ran in the race for the development of AI.

Taiwan’s position 130km off the coast of the mainland also gives it a key strategic location. Over half the world’s container fleet sails through the Taiwan Strait, the narrow body of water keeping Taiwan and the PRC apart. There are also channels between Taiwan and Okinawa to the north and the Philippines’ island of Luzon to the south that China is keen to control. In fact, it would be fair to say that China wants control of all shipping that flows through the South China Sea and has militarized the area to state this point unequivocally.

The PRC’s so-called “ten-dash line” (it used to be called the nine-dash line, but China recently added another dash) encompasses virtually the entire South China Sea basin. Given the area’s critical importance to global trade, the Taiwan Strait thus holds the key to the financial well-being of almost every economy. It also includes territorial waters and land claimed by Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Indonesia. China’s claim, found to be unlawful by an international arbitration commission set up to examine the assertion, hasn’t stopped Beijing’s aggressive behavior in the region, and the PLAN regularly harasses any activity it sees as an attempt to minimize or undermine the mainland’s dominance of both the sea and airspace above it.

In effect, if the PRC managed to swallow Taiwan, that would hand off control of the global economy to Beijing. So, while the US doesn’t have an official relationship with Taiwan or even a defense treaty with it, there’s no question that it would go to war over maintaining the island’s independence. With stakes like this, if Washington wants to remain top dog, what choice does it have?

However, victory for either the US or China would come at an enormous cost for both, and that’s even assuming nukes aren’t brought to the gunfight. The accompanying table comparing the militaries of both nations provides some insight into the ferocity of the war should it go all-out kinetic.

It’s also unlikely such a conflict would be confined to the South China Sea. The United States has bases in Japan, the Philippines, and Australia that will provide logistical support at the very least. And given that all three of these are trading nations and have much to lose if China should prevail, more than logistics will surely be provided. Additionally, other nations, the UK and South Korea, at the very least, will align with the US because it’ll be in their best interest to do so.

That said, some experts believe an invasion of Taiwan by China will not generate the same outcry and support enjoyed by Ukraine in its fight for survival against Russia. For one thing, and unlike Ukraine, nations sympathetic to its plight don’t share its borders. For another, very few countries even recognise Taiwan as an independent sovereign state.

Meanwhile, Russia will side with China and bring Iran along for the ride. And many of the poorer nations Beijing has financially beggared through its Belt and Road program will also fall into line.

And then things will get seriously nasty.

China hasn’t fought a war since its brief tussle with Vietnam in 1979, which puts it at a disadvantage against an enemy that has been jumping from one armed conflict to the next — Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, Gulf War II, and Afghanistan…

Recognizing this, China has been actively recruiting pilots and soldiers with battlefield experience. And, after decades of running largely performative drills, the PLA has changed gear, conducting far more realistic exercises with allies playing the part of determined adversaries.

---

But it’s not all roses for the United States in the war-fighting game. While it does have the most powerful military the world has ever seen, it’s wielded by a country that is politically and ideologically broken, the divisions supercharged by an unfettered social media landscape

---

But it’s not all roses for the United States in the war-fighting game. While it does have the most powerful military the world has ever seen, it’s wielded by a country that is politically and ideologically broken, the divisions supercharged by an unfettered social media landscape that thrives on outrage and has put truth and facts to the sword. Unity is essential if a nation at war is to harness its human and material resources to best effect. It might have unity in its name, but that’s about as much of it as the United States can muster.

With centrally controlled media and an approved story to sell its people, Xi has no such problem.

As mentioned, joining China in the conflict will be Russia. It knows how to fight and fight dirty, as does Iran. Expect the Middle East to again cause problems for the West. There’ll also be the usual assassinations, this time around

across Europe and Asia, along with the sabotage of infrastructure, especially communications.

And, while I’m loath to be considered a conspiracy monger, perhaps all those millions of Teslas and BYDs driving around in the West might suddenly and inexplicably turn on their drivers, a version of the Israeli “pager” attack on Hezbollah.

No doubt, there’ll also be Chinese “sleeper cells” everywhere causing all kinds of mischief.

And that’s just in the first week. It won’t be pretty.

Fully appraised of the intelligence leaking out of every Chinese and American pore, nations other than Taiwan have, of late, been buying weapons hand over fist.

Australia’s AUKUS mega-billion-dollar nuclear submarines won’t arrive in time, but the treaty with the US and the UK has provided immediate access to top-shelf missile technology. The federal government is buying loads of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Naval Strike Missiles, and multiple HIMARS launches and missiles. It’s also spending billions upgrading military bases in the far north and hosting thousands of US Marines on rotation.

Japan is fortifying the US base on the island of Okinawa, integrating more holistically with the US military, purchasing high-end military hardware such as F-35 Lightning IIs, and buying warships. Eighty years after losing WWII, it has made the agonizing decision to rearm. That, if nothing else, should get the alarm bells ringing.

The Philippines, too, has handed over four new sites to the US Navy on which to build bases. It’s also spending big on defense, as is South Korea.

It’s almost as if these nations are seeing the water of the South China Sea suddenly and dramatically recede and, knowing now what this portends, are rushing for higher ground in the face of the inevitable tsunami to come.

Of course, we could all decide just to let Xi have Taiwan. What do we care? It’s a long way away, and it’s not our fight. There’ll be a lot of this kind of talk. There is a lot of this talk now. At least where I live, in Australia.

Why should we help defend Taiwan? My answer to the question is a question: do you want to live under a Chinese hegemony or the American version of it? While the latter’s certainly not perfect, it is the devil we know. And I can write articles like this without being banished to a re-education camp along with all my family and close friends.

In Australia, we’ve experienced what mild Chinese displeasure feels like when Beijing, annoyed when our COVID prime minister Scott Morrison dared to say publicly what everyone was thinking at the time — that COVID originated in China — hit us with a raft of damaging, coercive trade embargoes.

And if China does succeed in controlling all trade in the South China Sea, as I said, it’s game over for Australian sovereignty. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the Chinese a lot, but not so much that I want to become one.

---

For a fuller picture…

---

More reviews, and still going strong. If you’ve enjoyed my books featuring Special Agent Vin Cooper, this is a cracker. It’s all Cooper in the Ist person, so your in his head the entire time. It’s disturbing, but in an amusing way. No wonder it’s a five-star read! And if you get the ebook version, cheap as dirt.