Highlights from the Comments to "China Doesn't Have the Balls to Invade Taiwan"

I’ve decided that a Clown Car episode every week isn’t really necessary, and I can sometimes replace it with an extra article instead. This is what I’m doing here, where I’m going to respond to some of the comments from “China Doesn’t Have the Balls to Invade Taiwan.”

Boring bureaucrat with boring wife, not going to start a major war. Source.

I think this is one of those questions that make forecasting so much fun. It’s not like predicting the murder rate in Chicago next year where everyone has to look at the same data. There’s potentially an infinite amount of evidence you could apply to the analysis, and no one has expertise in every area that might be relevant. A guy might just get really into the military balance of power and the latest weapons purchases, and believe that tells him what is going to happen. Others might simply focus on the intentions and beliefs of Chinese leaders. Even among those who pay more attention to political factors, there is still the question of what kind of evidence you find most relevant. The ideology of the Chinese Communist Party? My method involved looking at the behavior of the Chinese government over time and trying to find patterns. Those who disagreed with me in many cases emphasized other factors they thought were at least as important. My responses to these comments therefore do not necessarily challenge the evidence presented but instead downplay its importance.

Other comments gave me additional arguments I hadn’t thought of as to why China wouldn’t invade. Yet others were just about interesting aspects of US or Chinese culture more generally. I’ve therefore broken the comments up into those three categories.