Seems to still be an open question to me.
I believe there are lots of contingencies involved.
One of the important ones, imho, is prayer on the part of believers around the world.
I've seen prophetic messages in both directions--which affirms to me that the issue is very conditional.
I'm not optimistic. But, we shall see. I do believe that if they attack Taiwan, they will also attack the USA.
Certainly the puppet masters would be eager to have WWIV coerce the world's populace into the global government. They have been itching for it for quite some time.
I just don't know when God will allow it to cut loose.
I pray we have several more years of relative peace to work while there's still some 'light.'
Yes, I've read Poohbah and others insisting that China's not so stupid; China's military can't begin to match ours etc.
None of these analyses, imho, takes into adequate consideration Chinese pride and arrogant cussedness in the interest of national pride in addition to leadership pride. I still say--they'd easily lose more than 500,000,000 citizens just in the name of leadership OR national pride. And, sadly, a LOT of those citizens would also agree that it was a reasonable price to pay.
The economic thing would be far secondary and something they would feel they could easily overcome in a more than acceptably short time.
They somewhat reasonably see the USA as in inevitable decline and their star as rising economically, militarily and in terms of control of the planet. They are itching to make it a more overt reality and believe that nothing can stop them.
I'm more than quite confident of this analysis. I have far too many data points toward it over too many recent years of close observation and querying astute residents of Mainland China.
It is NOT going to happen, at least in our lifetime.
Nothing can stop them but the fall of the USA economic system which is the integral part that maintains their optimistic growth outlook.
D@mn, that puts them in a "catch22" situation doesn't it?