I’ll stand on what I said.
Anyone still reading this can make their own assessment of some supposed “expert” who is projecting peacetime population behaviors onto a wartime situation where a hostile foreign power is attempting a starvation by blockade to effect a Regime collapse / Regime change.
The natural reaction is going to be extreme nationalism and extreme support for Total War, as well as a willingness to volunteer for combat units as well as sacrifice for the war effort.
And it doesn’t fade after a year or two, either.
For example, look at German industrial production for 1944, despite raw materials shortages, and massive bombing the previous three years.
Without food scarcity and high prices, there probably would not have been a French Revolution and the radicalism of the Left, Germany could well have won WW I, and she might not have invaded the Soviet Union in WW II. With a bitter memory of Stalin's deliberate use of famine to kill millions of Ukrainians, most of them today are determined not to be ruled by Russia if at all possible.
China's reliance on foreign food and fertilizer to feed her massive population is a well-known strategic vulnerability. Throughout Chinese history, famine and economic collapse tend to lead to regime change. Widespread food riots and civil disorder and cannibalism occurred in China even in the last hundred years. In 1958, Mao's collectivization drive caused a mass famine that remains a sensitive issue for the CCP.
The Chinese government today prioritizes food security and stockpiles food and raw materials. There are hard limits though to such a strategy as a remedy against a blockade. Most notably, the loss of foreign export markets would devastate China's economy and deprive the CCP of its main source of legitimacy.
Meanwhile, China's current position of increased power in alliance with Russia would be reversed and make China a supplicant for Russian potash fertilizer that could be essential to her survival. Might a Trump II administration settle the Ukraine war and require Russia to align against China in return for sanctions relief? It is hard to imagine that Chairman Xi has not been briefed on that possibility.
As for arms production, if you dig deeper, you will find that Nazi Germany's seeming production miracle in the latter phase of WW II is less impressive than touted by Albert Speer in his massive, best-selling memoir. Here's a hint: treat exculpatory memoirs by Nazis with skepticism.
As Hitler's minister for armament, Speer ordered German factories to shove new aircraft, tanks, and weapons and munitions out the door for delivery in spite of defects and a lack of spare parts. At the end of the war, Germany was littered with thousands of derelict but factory new tanks and aircraft that could not be made operable.
Hitler of course saw the factory production numbers and took them at face value, so Speer kept his neck and survived the war. Goering, who knew better about the hollowness of Speer's methods, did not press the issue because of his own vulnerability over massive bribe-taking and his maladministration and failures as head of the Luftwaffe and the German economy.
Even Himmler kept quiet because his power and wealth was on the rise as an ally of Speer. As Hitler took heart at Speer's impressive tallies, Himmler chimed in that his slave labor force was essential to that spot of bright news. In the end, even Nazi Germany's genuine advances in jet aircraft and long range rockets proved to be of little effect on the war because they were technologically immature and limited in numbers and in operational use.
Postwar, Speer claimed that he made the factory production lines under his control generate massive output -- but without controlling the work force and its large component of brutally exploited concentration camp labor from Himmler. Historians grit their teeth at public credulity for obvious lies by Speer that are so carefully tailored to fit a phony historical narrative that eases German guilt and subtly massages German pride.
Germans like to whisper to themselves that Hitler was not so bad because he rebuilt the economy, put people to work, conquered France and Poland, expanded the Reich -- and got rid of nasty Jews. Who could have imagined though that the Nazis also sent their grandmother's nice Jewish doctor and his family into the extermination camps when they were arrested by the Gestapo? Why even someone as close to Hitler as Speer did not know what was going on, so ordinary Germans cannot fairly be accused of guilty knowledge.
Moreover, as Speer and other former Nazis suggest, with good generals in charge and Speer's production methods, Germany might have won the war. Yet this is a fantasy in that as in WW I, a land power with limited resources like Germany was fundamentally unable to win WW II against Allied control of the seas and far more of the world's economy and resources.
The CCP regime in China today has parallels with that of Nazi Germany. China is run by an ideological political party that celebrates force and has a powerful economy and military at its disposal. China though also has massive corruption, prison labor camps, and phony accounting, even as to her military forces.
Geographic constraints also make for serious vulnerabilities for China that have no sure remedies. Chairman Xi and his circle want Taiwan, but, for now, and perhaps forever, it remains beyond China's grasp if the US and her allies play their cards well.
Most of all, we have to know China's weaknesses and politely make clear to China that we can put the screws to them if we have to. And, to get back to my original point, control of the world's financial system and of sea lanes by the US Navy and those of our allies make it possible to do that without extensive fighting in the seas near China.