not as in “what location” more “what would force them to go to war”
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For decades I have asked myself one simple question: why is China building up its industrial capacity? The answer is obvious. They’re going to make a large wooden horse with every member of the PLA inside and send it to the US as a gift.
They should 3D print it. PLA inside, PLA outside.
US bombs taiwan because taiwan decides to peacefully move closer to china and eventual integration.
the odds of that integration are low though? there too much poison in their ears.
Not really, pro-Chinese politicians in taiwan are gaining popularity
The KMT has been moving the island closer towards peaceful relations and eventual integration, they aren’t the current ruling government but that can change
Pearl Harbor was/is a colonial holding of the US empire, thousands of miles across the Pacific. The attack by Japan was preemptive, before attacking the other colonial holdings even closer to Japan, notably the US bases in the Philippines. The brave Filipinos and their colonial occupiers held out for about four months before falling to the Japanese.
Franklin Roosevelt intentionally emphasized only Pearl Harbor as the locus of Japanese aggression because the US public already saw Hawai‘i (not to become a US state until 18 years later!) as part of their mental backyard, even if in reality it is thousands of miles away; cruises to Hawai‘i began shortly after its initial occupation in the early 20th century. FDR’s
omission(edit: de-emphasis, more accurately) of the Philippines from his first speech to the US public after Dec 7, 1941 is documented via initial speech drafts which did give the Philippines equal weight as Hawai‘i as a victim of Japanese aggression. He feared that the US public, which had already resisted entering the war for several years by that point, would not want to go to war over obscure colonial territory which anyone with a globe could see is physically much closer to Japan than the US.Returning to the question about China, I do not think there is an equivalent because China does not maintain remote imperial bases that could be attacked like this. Therefore the only possible equivalent would be an attack directly on Chinese territory, which would mean war for any sovereign nation on Earth.
the closest equivalent I could think would be either ports that lease sections out to the Chinese navy, like the Port of Doraleh in Djibouti or that one in Sri Lanka, or Chinese consulates. I don’t either of them could be sold as legitimate military targets since the ports are multi-use and are civilian owned. Furthermore many of the countries that have Chinese owned ports are American or NATO allies, like Greece, Belgium, Germany, etc. I don’t think NATO allies would enjoy having their ports suddenly attacked by American drones, even if the ports are leased out to Chinese SOEs.
The only overseas Chinese land base I know would be the one in Tajikistan, that’s more of a security monitoring facility that Tajikistan asked for to monitor security along the Afghanistan border. But that base is 30 km from the Chinese border, the base itself is equipped with MANPADs, and Tajikistan itself has Chinese supplied SAMs. The PLA has radar and HQ-9s pointing directly at the airspace over that base so there’s not an easy way of attacking it by air. And it’s way up in the mountains so a ground assault would also be stupid. It’s also just a tiny rinky-dink monitoring facility that wouldn’t have a ton of strategic value if destroyed, so why even bother attacking it
There’s really not an easy way of suddenly attacking China without simply invading the mainland and I don’t know why anyone would think that’s a good idea at all
The phrasing of the question is a bit weird. I don’t think there is likely to be an equivalent of Pearl Harbour for China. Personally I think direct military conflict between China and either the US or its regional allies is still unlikely.
The major hypothetical one, however, without assigning probability, would be Taiwan, as others have mentioned in this thread. Another would be Japan pursuing sovereign nuclear weapons (rather than just hosting*) or changing its constitution to instantiate an effectively offensive military force (rather than maintaining a Self Defence Force). China would seek to militarily reunify Taiwan in either instance.
*The US is deliberately vague about whether nuclear capable and nuclear armed vessels or aircraft pass through or are stationed at bases across the Pacific. Even if Japan ostensibly disallows the hosting of such weapons, I am not naive enough to think that the US doesn’t deliberately do so, or would do so, regardless
China does not have an empire of far reaching colonial bases so they don’t have any Pearl Harbor equivalent.
So China is the US in that scenario and the US is Japan? Maybe military re-occupation of Taiwan or attacks in the south china sea. China just doesn’t have this network of military bases scattered across the world.
the most obvious equivalent to me would be attacks on their navy in the south china sea. the US is constantly poised to do so
The three gorges dam, if it was bombed it would cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
and warmongering amerikans constantly talk about bombing it too
The US decides to get cocky and missile strike the mainland or do something “”““creative””“” with Hong Kong, Macau, or the Island of Taiwan.
Honestly China has incredible anger management skills. I’d like to have some of them!
