2027 is drawing near.
The year that some believe will be pivotal in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s invasion plans for Taiwan is mere months away.
China’s resources will be in place.
Its military will be strong enough for what Xi wants to do.
But China has a problem.
There is something in the water that has killed China’s Taiwan invasion plans before they’ve even gotten off the ground.
Taiwan has a brilliant plan for halting China, and it involves something that nobody saw coming… Doing nothing.
Why? Because China doesn’t have the military strength that it needs to take Taiwan, and it all comes down to the water that China needs to cross.
Now, we know that this sounds crazy, especially when you look at the raw numbers.
There is no area in which Taiwan has the advantage if we simply stack its military up against China’s to see who comes out on top.
China’s 2.035 million active military personnel absolutely dwarf Taiwan’s 230,000.
And even when you throw Taiwan’s 1.657 million reserves into the mix, China has 510,000 reserves to bring to the fight, maintaining a clear manpower advantage.
China spends 10 times the amount that Taiwan does on its military each year, it has over 3,529 aircraft versus Taiwan’s 720, a naval fleet that is veering close to ten times the size of Taiwan’s, and, of course, plenty of missiles.
It looks like China holds all of the cards.
But it doesn’t.
Now, you might think that we’re about to say that the U.S.getting involved, along with other major Indo-Pacific powers, would signal the death of Xi’s plans.
But we aren’t going to say that.
All of those factors may come into play, especially if China threatens the key piece of leverage that Taiwan has over the rest of the world.
However, even without the involvement of other nations, China’s plan for Taiwan isn’t going to work.
Taiwan can defend itself on its own, and there’s a clear reason why: To conquer Taiwan, China has to pull off the single largest amphibious assault in modern military history.
And it doesn’t have the experience to do it.
Let’s take a trip back in time to Operation Overlord during World War II.
Launched in 1944, and often known as D-Day, Operation Overlord was, and still is, the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare.
The statistics tell the full story.
The Allies used well over 5,000 ships to conduct landings on five beaches in Normandy.
Over 150,000 troops landed, and there were 1.4 million American servicemen stationed in the U.K., ready to provide logistics and a continuous flow of troops into France once the landings were completed.
Add all other Allies into the mix, and the U.K.was host to two million troops from 12 countries, all ready to take the fight back to Germany.
The Allies already had air supremacy ahead of the landings, allowing the Allies to fly around 14,000 sorties to support the amphibious operation.
And still, these landings were incredibly bloody, costing the Allies around 10,500 casualties when it was all said and done.
Why are we telling you all of this? The whole point is that Operation Overlord was conducted from a position of relative strength by the Allies.
China doesn’t have that position as it gears up for its amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
The numbers may be in favor of the People’s Liberation Army, but the Chinese navy, in particular, doesn’t have what it needs to conduct a similar sort of operation that would be required to move soldiers into Taiwan.
For a start, the two-million-man army isn’t what it seems.
Sure, we could pretend that China would focus all two million of its soldiers on Taiwan.
But the reality is that it won’t.
China needs to keep soldiers stationed on the border with India to maintain its position there.
Around 25,000 soldiers are in that region right now.
Throughout China itself, soldiers are stationed to protect Xi and his domestic interests.
The point here is that the manpower advantage isn’t all that it seems to be from the start.
But China’s much larger problem isn’t the number of men it can dedicate.
It’s getting those soldiers into Taiwan.
That’s where the water comes in.
Operation Overlord saw hundreds of thousands of troops sail across the relatively calm English Channel into France.
That channel separates England and France by around 35 kilometers at its narrowest point, and the Operation Overlord crossing didn’t have to concern itself with difficult weather conditions.
But China? It has to cross the Taiwan Strait just to stand a chance of landing troops onto the territory of its enemy, and that’s a difficult prospect for so many reasons.
For a start, there’s the distance.
Chinese troops would have to travel about five times the distance by ship to reach Taiwan than the Allies did to storm the beaches of Normandy.
That distance creates time, and that time can be used by Taiwan to launch surface-to-air missiles against Chinese aircraft, deploy submarines to cripple ships, and send anti-ship missiles and drones in the direction of anything China sends.
That’s not to mention Taiwanese airpower.
Remember, the Allies had air supremacy ahead of Operation Overlord.
China doesn’t have that over Taiwan, so it’s not like China can batter the beaches and Taiwan’s coastal defenses from the sky with impunity.
But all of this requires Taiwan to actually do something.
We told you that Taiwan wouldn’t have to do anything.
And the reason for that is that the Taiwan Strait is an absolutely merciless body of water.
The English Channel is calm.
But the lethal Taiwan Strait is incredibly difficult to navigate at the best of times due to the weather.
Between June and August, and again between November and February, the Taiwan Strait has frequent monsoons and even typhoons, which make amphibious operations next to impossible.
At best, China would have to accept sacrificing dozens of ships and thousands of soldiers if it attacked during any of these months.
So, China is limited in when it can attack, and that means Taiwan is able to prepare for the months when the Taiwan Strait is calm.
Even if China does attack during the rain-logged summer months, the delays would just create more opportunities for Taiwan to hit Chinese ships before they ever get close to the coast.
And let’s say that China manages to weather these very literal storms.
What then? In Operation Overlord, the Allies had their pick of the beaches in Normandy.
Yes, those beaches were fortified.
But the combination of all of the factors we mentioned, especially the air supremacy, means that the Allies were in a great position for storming those beaches.
Taiwan is a whole different story.
Taiwan’s mountainous geography massively complicates a Chinese amphibious landing.
Around 60% of Taiwan is covered in mountains.
Despite Taiwan having several dozen available beaches, Newsweek points out that China would be limited to attempting to land troops on fewer than 20 of what have been identified as “red beaches.
” All of those beaches and their coastlines are being fortified, and China still faces the prospect of navigating near impossible terrain to get to Taipei, where urban combat would be triggered and the trickle of Chinese troops making it through would be at a severe disadvantage.
That brings us back to manpower.
We mentioned earlier that Taiwan’s military doesn’t have as much manpower as China’s military, even when taking reserves into account.
But those are just the raw numbers.
In reality, China needs to hold back hundreds of thousands of troops for domestic defense, and Taiwan has over 1.
6 million reserves on top of its active military, who would all have the singular purpose of protecting their country.
China has to try to match those numbers, and the conditions in the Taiwan Strait make that practically impossible.
After all, it’s not just landing troops that is an issue.
It’s keeping them supplied.
Building stable supply routes into Taiwan, even if China can establish itself on a few of the red beaches, is a logistical nightmare.
Taiwan has anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles.
Very advanced missiles, thanks to its relationship with the United States.
Combine their usage to take out supply ships and cargo planes with the fact that China can barely use the Taiwan Strait for six months out of the year, and you get a logistical catastrophe just waiting to happen.
China may indeed be able to land a hundred thousand soldiers on Taiwan.
But the odds are those soldiers will be cut off from supplies, face almost impossible geography, and have to deal with a fully mobilized Taiwanese army that is far larger than what China can actually bring to bear, despite its on-paper manpower advantage.
Admiral Lee Hsi-min, who was the Chief of the General Staff of Taiwan’s Armed Forces until 2019, sums it up perfectly when speaking to The Economist in 2023.
“This is their soft spot,” Lee tells the outlet.
“If Taiwan doesn’t surrender, once you’ve landed, you still have to fight for a period of time, maybe one week or two weeks or whatever.
Where are your logistics? Your logistics support needs to come in across the Strait but ours don’t have to.
We fight in our own yard.
” Nothing has changed since 2023.
And what this means for Xi and China is that the route to a Chinese victory is tiny, even if we disregard the likely involvement of other nations coming to Taiwan’s defense.
But it goes even deeper than that.
Xi’s Taiwan invasion wouldn’t just be a story of something in the Taiwanese water ruining his plans.
China’s military is not what it seems.
The country’s economy is veering close to collapse.
And not even a missile-laden strategy chosen ahead of an amphibious invasion would work.
Why? Before we answer those questions, this is a quick reminder that you’re watching The Military Show.
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So, China’s military.
It doesn’t just face the absolute nightmare that is crossing and maintaining supply routes through the Taiwan Strait.
China also has to deal with all of that while having a military that, though massive on paper, doesn’t have any real combat experience.
Former U.
S.
Defense Secretary and CIA chief Robert Gates pointed that out in a May interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, stating, “There isn’t one single Chinese general or admiral today that has one day of combat experience.
The last time these guys fought was 1979, and the North Vietnamese- the Vietnamese gave them a bloody nose.
” All those generals are long gone, having been purged by Xi, and that’s another problem that China faces.
The country’s Defense Ministry is in shambles.
Back in May, two former Chinese Defense Ministers, Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, were given suspended death sentences, supposedly due to bribery but just as likely because they didn’t agree with Xi on certain issues.
Both had been purged by China’s President, and they now face the most severe punishment that China has handed out during the years-long purge of its military.
And that mention of such a massive purge is an issue in its own right.
Stability isn’t a thing in the People’s Liberation Army.
For all of its size and the scale of China’s investment, corruption and purges run roughshod through any serious strategic planning that China could have in place for Taiwan.
Back in October 2025, the Chinese Communist Party expelled nine of the country’s top generals in a sweeping crackdown on corruption.
Not that it matters.
China’s military, outside of the manpower and machines, is rotten to the very core.
That’s what The National Interest said in January 2026, as it pointed out that corruption is so endemic in the Chinese military that even some of the liquid-fueled missiles China would likely want to use against Taiwan are actually filled with water.
They won’t be going anywhere when the launch orders are made, so we see China crippling itself from the inside when it comes to an invasion of Taiwan.
Again, Taiwan doesn’t have to do anything.
This is a problem all of China’s own making, and the destabilization that has resulted will only spell more issues for an amphibious invasion that is already fraught with danger.
And the purges go even deeper than you think.
The China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out that more than 100 senior officers from the People’s Liberation Army have received their marching orders since 2022, which amounts to a complete restructuring of the upper echelons of the Chinese military in the five years up to the anticipated 2027 invasion.
Again, corruption is often blamed for these purges, but there is a second layer of corruption beyond water in missiles and bribes.
There are dual chains of command in the People’s Liberation Army – military and political.
On the latter side, reliability, which translates to a willingness to agree to anything that Xi says, is valued more heavily than acumen and strong decision-making.
So, the Chinese military essentially has to deal with an internal power struggle that is the result of Xi trying to control everything.
As for the soldiers, they aren’t trusted to make decisions for themselves, meaning any invasion of Taiwan would have to deal with the issue of inexperienced automatons having no real idea of what they’re supposed to be doing.
It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
But what if China just cuts out the manpower aspect and goes with a missile-heavy strategy? Bombarding Taiwan from afar would solve some of the problems posed by corruption and the Taiwan Strait.
And China certainly has enough missiles for such a strategy.
As the U.
S.
Army University Press notes, China’s military has over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles, along with enough anti-ship missiles to launch an attack against the entire U.
S.
Navy.
Even if we take out the waterlogged missiles we mentioned earlier, that’s still plenty of firepower to bring to bear against Taiwan.
However, China can’t really use those missiles to hit the heart of Taiwan.
Why? Semiconductors.
These chips are essential to the entire global economy and, more importantly, they’re required for every modern missile and piece of military equipment in the world.
And Taiwan is the heart of the global semiconductor industry.
Global Taiwan Institute reports that the country’s semiconductor testing and packaging industries alone captured 50% of the market in 2023.
Right now, Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and accounts for 70% of the semiconductor foundry market.
The technological lifeblood of the entire world beats through the Taiwanese chip heart, and China is just as beholden as anybody else.
The Council on Foreign Relations highlights this, noting that China imports $400 billion worth of semiconductors per year, and has only reached 16% self-sufficiency in this area, despite having a goal of hitting 70% in 2025.
And worse than that, China doesn’t build the semiconductors used in advanced weaponry.
Taiwan does.
Of course, this is one of the reasons that China wants Taiwan.
If you control semiconductors, you control the world in a way that many underestimate.
But that’s what makes a missile-heavy strategy so dangerous for China.
It could launch missiles at Taipei for weeks and weeks, sure.
But it only takes one of those missiles going astray to take out the world’s advanced semiconductor supply.
Taiwan knows it, and it may even have a “Silicon Shield” plan that would cause it to destroy, or at least threaten to destroy, its own semiconductor industry if China threatens to invade.
We mentioned other powers getting involved a few times already.
This is why those powers would want to get involved.
If Taiwanese chip foundries go down, by China’s hand or Taiwan’s own, it would spark a catastrophe that would cripple military supply and, arguably, the entire world.
This is what leverage looks like.
Taiwan only has to threaten to blow it all up, and it takes the entire world’s electronics down with it.
The threat alone would be enough to turn the world’s attention toward China, leading to intense pressure that would force Xi to back off.
But Taiwan might not even have to go so far.
Take water, military incompetence, corruption, and chips, and you get a poisonous recipe for Xi and his Taiwan plans.
But adding to all of this is another problem that would hamper any long-term military engagement that China looks to launch.
China’s economy is in trouble.
A housing bubble is on the verge of popping, and it would cripple China’s ability to sustain a Taiwan invasion.
The Atlantic Council said in January that China’s housing market had entered its fifth year of being in a slump.
There are 80 million unsold homes on the Chinese market, the think tank says, and it says that one Chinese economist even believes that 80% of developers and construction firms in China are going to “exit the market” in the coming years.
China has entire ghost cities that have been built up but remain mostly unpopulated, slowly turning into rotting carcasses of investment excess into an industry that China wanted to believe would never stop growing.
DW adds that China’s housing bubble had already pushed property prices to over 17 times the average salary, which is simply unaffordable for most, and it demonstrates why the ghost cities exist in the first place.
The Chinese housing bubble is about as large as it can get.
Soon, it’s going to go pop.
And when it does, China’s entire economy will follow.
You could argue that the bubble has already burst, as China is already in a slump and shows little sign of recovering.
But as things get worse, China’s economic weaknesses will come to the forefront.
Beyond housing, China’s economy relies heavily on exports.
Japan, the U.
S.
, South Korea, and Taiwan account for 21.
31% of China’s exports.
If China invades Taiwan, all four could stop buying, and China would have serious problems.
The European Union, as a collective, is another major customer.
It could stop buying, putting even more pressure on China.
And in the Indo-Pacific and surrounding regions, countries like the Philippines and Vietnam might also stop buying, as they’re already contesting mineral rights and the control of small islands in the South China Sea, meaning a moment of economic weakness for China would be pounced upon.
And China can’t do much about any of this.
It has a product-based economy and barely any natural resources, such as oil and gas, that it can rely on to prop things up in the same way that Russia has been able to establish a shadow economy to keep its war in Ukraine going.
The money would simply stop coming in.
And as more is pushed into military spending once the Taiwan invasion is launched, that problem gets worse, the housing crisis expands, and China sends itself down the same road to economic ruin that we see in Russia right now.
We’re going to state the obvious here – China needs money to keep an invasion of Taiwan going.
If its economy crumbles, aided by other powers putting trade pressure on China, that would be the death knell for an invasion that already carries so much risk from the very start.
And again, Taiwan would have to do little except stop buying and selling to China, and then lean on its chip industry and the importance of that to convince allies to pile on the pressure.
And so, Taiwan’s plan for a Chinese invasion is simple: Let them come.
Taiwan’s combination of geography, modern military tech, and geopolitical importance means it can weather the storm.
China can’t.
Quite literally, in terms of the Taiwan Strait, but also economically, militarily, and when it comes to the geopolitical hellscape that China would find itself in if Xi follows through on his plans.
The invasion is over before it even starts.
Taiwan holds all the cards.
Now, imagine this – what if Ukraine gets involved? Having established itself as the world’s drone experts, it’s no stretch to imagine that Ukraine would offer Taiwan maritime drones that would make the Taiwan Strait even more dangerous.
Euromaidan Press reports that Ukraine is already making drone overtures to Taiwan.
And those drones, maritime or aerial, are more than dangerous enough to cause even more problems for China in the Taiwan Strait.
Do you want to see why? Check out our video, where we cover Ukraine’s world-first attack against the Russian Navy.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
