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OK, they haven't seized Kinmen. Either this might be because they can't or they don't want to. We know they employed a 'hide and bide' strategy for decades, they have a capacity for patience. Why would they blow their load on Kinmen before they're ready to attack Taiwan? And what do you mean by 'project force' - they can surely bomb and land troops there. It's only that doing so might be risky and they don't judge it to be cost-efficient right now. Like how the US might choose not to invade Iran.
If I were a Chinese strategist, I would wait until the balance of power was most favourable before taking any big risks. They've antagonized and bullied a lot of their neighbours, sure. But they also secured some gains from that - bases in the South China Sea. That's useful real estate, albeit hard to supply.
Isn't pounding Guam with missiles a threat to the US? Yokohama? Taiwan and South Korea are within sieging range. The North Korean military may not be great but they do have a lot of mass. With Chinese air power and a group army or two they'd eventually wear the South Koreans down. South Korea is very strong and it would be hard fighting but I expect China could force some kind of major concessions on the South, if only by constraining their ability to import food and energy for their war effort. They might aim for the ejection of US troops (I suspect the whole conflict might spring out of THAAD's relevance to Taiwan scenarios and other US capabilities there), access to naval bases, preferential access to semiconductors. Being a near-nuclear power is enough to escape annexation but they are facing 2-3 bigger nuclear powers. Can you really escalate to nuclear warfare over terms like that, Finlandization+?
In the 1950s, China was able to 'project force' in Korea, they even captured Seoul at one point. And that was when the US had overwhelming air superiority, artillery superiority, tank superiority, logistics, uncontested sea control. Why do you have such a low opinion of Chinese capabilities? It's a very big country full of pretty smart people, they're naturally powerful even when poor and undeveloped. They're not poor and undeveloped anymore.
If they can bully South Korea into quitting the war and bully Taiwan into being annexed, that alone would be a victory for China and a pretty massive blow for America.
Man, your understanding of the Korean War is limited at best.
The US got caught off guard and nearly pushed off the peninsula, sure, but we decided to only beat the ChiComms and North Koreans halfway back up the peninsula. We weren’t willing to seek actual victory, an attitude that went on to serve us well in Vietnam too.
(I actually think McArthur was probably right and we should have nuked the Chinese to keep North Korea from existing, given how things went thereafter.)
'They caught us off guard' = they skilfully evaded US reconnaissance with night marches and camouflage. Macarthur was warned repeatedly but was too careless in his advance. Zhou Enlai gave his warnings and was ignored.
You're making the exact same mistake that Macarthur did. "The Chinese are poor and weak, we can ignore them lmao" -> "WTF, holy shit, they're everywhere, how did this happen, I need nuclear strikes!" All they had was clever infantry tactics back then.
China is a tough adversary, as was discovered in the 1950s. They weren't the biggest manufacturing power in the world back then. Massively underestimating your enemies is not the path to success. It may well have been a good idea to kneecap China back in the 1950s or work with Brezhnev to crush them (a decapitation strike in the 1990s could also have worked) but it's too late for that now.
I agree the US should have had better intelligence and taken the Chinese warnings seriously. And then blasted them to hell with superior firepower.
But Korea was a sideshow during the Cold War and not sufficiently important to get a war-weary public motivated to support it.
I don’t think I am. I’m a China hawk myself. There’s a lot of unknowns about how well the US and Chinese militaries would operate in a full on war. With Russia, we saw massive underperformance in Ukraine, but we just don’t really know how good the Chinese navy and military technology is compared to the US.
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