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Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?
That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.
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