I just drew the two routes on Google Earth and asked Kimi to perform a comparison. From just outside the mouth of the Malacca Straight directly to Japan is around 6,000 KM. Going around via Indonesia makes it about 10,000 KM, depending on how much extra safety distance you want to maintain away from the South China Sea and China itself. You're looking at about 10 days for the former and about 16 days for the latter, at a total extra cost of $600,000 to $1.2M per ship. I am pretty sure the Nip navy would be completely sunk soon enough if the Nips actively took up arms against China. There would be nothing to stop the Chinese navy from simply sailing back and forth around the East and South of Japan to stop ships from passing. Insurers would not cover commercial ships traveling those routes during a war scenario, so most ships would decline to ship to Japan regardless. The only ones that would, would do so only at price points high enough to cover losses from sunk ships. In other words, it would not be long before Japan ran out of industrial inputs, fuel, and food.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
My point is that those ships would never make it to Japan anyways. If Japan began military hostilities with China as a consequence of a Taiwan AR scenario, those ships would be intercepted and never permitted to dock at Japan. Very soon, no ships would sail there anyways due to refusal by their insurance companies to cover those routes. Logistically those routes could still be made viable and profitable, but only with the assumption those ships would not be sunk or turned back. China would obviously not stand by and watch Japan engage in armed hostilities with her while doing nothing to disrupt its trade routes. And so no ships would attempt to sail those routes to Japan, period.
The US would not likely give Japan a choice in the matter. Their puppet prime minister would be coerced into ordering military hostilities at gunpoint/threat of assassination of her entire family if necessary. Even if the US decides it does not want to get directly involved, I am certain it would be happy to sacrifice the lives of millions or even tens of millions of citizens from its vassals if it can harm China even slightly. Even if only just reputational damage.
We would never joke about Trump behind his back either
It’s actually when Japan invaded Indochina and Burma that the west turned against Japan. Before that they were secretly supporting Japan. But after ww2 they pretty much forgave Japan because Japan wasn’t really punished.
True enough. It's just like how the Straits of Malacca is a strategic chokepoint for China, but ships can bypass it. It's still very inconvenient, and costly to do long term. The point is more that there are all sorts of pain points China can apply on Japan even if China were to lose a war, and it's something that Japan is probably quite aware of. While Japanese politics is dysfunctional, I don't see their leaders as being as blind to practical realities the way that countries like Australia is.
They forgave Japan because of CPC victory in 1949 and the Korean War, when Japan become a logistical supplier for UN troops in Korea. That’s when you have the San Francisco Treaty (in which both PRC and ROC refused to sign). The Truman Administration long hoped the ROC would America’s main bulwark in Asia against the Soviet Union (which already occupied northern Xinjiang and Manchuria in 1945). Call it history’s tragedy, but Chiang’s KMT was simply a failed state from 1944-1949. The 1944 Operation Ichi-Go drained Chiang of the last bits of tax revenues he received from agricultural tax in Hunan, Guangxi, and mother parts of China not occupied by Japan. Corruption at all levels then was the only way for KMT bureaucrats to survive. The rest, as we know, is history. But the result of the Chinese Civil War and Korean War is China was no longer a U.S. ally against the USSR, so postwar Japan replaced China. Things happened quite quickly, so there was no denazification in Japan. Washington needed a competent and internally stable ally capable of collaborating and coordinating with U.S. strategic goals on a broad range of issues. And Chiang’s China was too weak to play such a role. In short, neither the Cold War nor WWII (plus Chinese and Korean civil wars) ever ended in Asia. Chiang was a Shakespearean tragic figure who simply lacked the resource to fix a broken state. But Chiang did what he could. And because of this tragic post-war history, Japan was never punished for its crimes.