Can China protect their relevant industrial base from being quickly degraded by intelligence + bombers? In WW2, Japan had no power projection into the US mainland, so the industrial base of US sealed the deal.
Most likely yes, simply by the scale of their industrial base and military strength. No way the US can significantly degrade Chinese industrial base in a war scenario without using massive amounts of nukes and I don't think even Trump is that insane.
This appears to assume a lack of intelligence such that the entire industrial base needs to be targeted. But only a relatively small subtree of the industrial base is relevant, and you don't necessarily need to degrade the whole subtree, it can be sufficient to degrade key nodes that create supply chain bottlenecks. I'm not saying it can be done, but I am unpersuaded that it can't.
The problem is that the exact same can be said of the American industrial base and the American industrial base is much smaller than the Chinese one so it would be far easier to wipe out.
Wiped out with what aircraft carriers and with what air superiority? China has limited to no power projection into US mainland aside from ICBMs which are scarce. US has B2 bombers they can send over China. US has multiple nearby countries they can use as a staging ground for their F-16 and F-35s. They can send sorties over and over into China and drop thousands of JDAMs onto selected targets. China can't do anything like that. China's SRBMs and navy and airforce are a threat to Asian countries but not the US.
Recent war games paint a dire picture in a near-term hypothetical conflict with China over Taiwan.[0] They show the US tenuously holding Taiwan at the cost of two aircraft carriers, several dozen other ships, hundreds of aircraft and the depletion of hundreds anti-ship missiles that have a production lead time of months to years and measly annual production rates.
At the same time China continues to stockpile commodities[1] and holds an overwhelming advantage in ship building production capacity over the US[2].
America may currently have an advantage in power projection over China, but they lack the industrial base to sustain any sort of attack as their ship building and missile building capacity is completely atrophied. China just needs to hold the line in the first conflict with the US and then they can quickly rebuild what they lost and launch barrages of drones at Taiwan.
As for how China can disrupt American industrial capacity? At first it will probably be a combination of unorthodox techniques including cyberattacks, agit-prop disruption techniques with social media, 5th column disruption like what we're seeing in Russia, and perhaps more exotic things like autonomous submarines that launch drones to attack infrastructure near the coast, or perhaps more of those balloons that they were using for surveillance but instead of surveillance equipment they'll contain drone swarms to be released over vital infrastructure or tinderbox forests.
It is unlikely that America will risk sending any B-52s over China and it's also unlikely that F-35s will pose any long term risk to Chinese industrial capacity given the brittle F-35 supply chain.
A war with China will be about whoever can produce more cheap weapons faster while deploying them in unexpected ways and China without a doubt wins that race.
B2 stealth will not serve you in the middle of a sensor (radar) network. And taking it out with radiation seeking missiles may not be a reliable counter. They almost certainly have a network of passive radars and disposable emitters.
An effective attack against Chinese mainland by US forces would be the trigger for nuclear war. The century of humiliation has cemented a "never again" attitude.
Also, Aircraft carriers are vulnerable to mass missile attacks, and land bases in the Philippines, Japan or Taiwan are within missile range.
Unlikely. Israel, a nuclear power by 1973, was attacked by multiple countries, and did not launch nukes. Russia, another nuclear power, is receiving attacks from Ukraine on a daily basis, and is not launching nukes.
As much as nuclear powers want you to think they will use them if you resist their goals, nukes only come into play when state survival is at risk, not when belligerents pursue limited goals. The US will never pursue the defeat of China. They will manage escalation. They will pursue the limited goals of status quo maintenance and a quick resolution, which can include bombing industrial production nodes to signal that China will lose a war of attrition, forcing it to call off an attack on Taiwan.
The key word was "effective". Ukraine's attacks haven't had any meaningful effect on the war. I would have no doubt that if Israel lost any of the conventional wars with it's neighbors, nuclear weapons would have been launched.
The original post was postulating that American bombers and intelligence could destroy China's production base. If US attacks did destroy a significant portion of China's factories, and production facilities, I have no doubt the war would become nuclear.
Israel was losing the Yom Kippur war until Kissinger's resupply effort. They didn't use nukes. Probably because Egypt signalled they were going for limited objectives. Israel's home front was also attacked unprovoked with Scud missiles by Saddam as a desperation measure during the Gulf War. No nuke usage.
Any US attack on China's industrial base would have similar signalling to control escalation risk. It would probably be limited to key nodes in the missile or drone supply chain rather than attacking the entire base. China likely wouldn't use nukes because they are also worried about the same escalation risks as the US. They will know the US is pursuing limited objectives. The US will probably tell them this through a deconfliction line, as well as publicly. If China does use nukes, it'll likely be limited with the goal of escalating to deescalate.
None of these decisions are easy and I agree there are significant risks. But I wouldn't rule it out, especially if the alternative is to lose a war of attrition and have your influence rolled back.
