Potential conflict beween China and Taiwan. What would be the impact on Luxembourg?

7 comments

1. Foreign affairs? I see you are a man/woman of culture aswell. Are you a political scientist?
   You rarely see that people on reddit link foreign affairs, international affairs or internationale politik (german) on reddit, eventough it’s much higher quality of political journalism than the mainstream newspapers.

   To answer your question, since I’m a member of the Neo-Realism gang – I hope you know what I mean – I think that war is inevitable on the long term.

   I can only hope that our politicians realise this soon enough, the last 10 years have proven once again that, in my opnion, Neo-Realism is right. International Institutions don’t work as intended and couldn’t prevent wars, and at the end of the day it’s about high politics, about defending your sovereignty.

   Since the western world, and to some extend also south america are the last free places on earth, the last democracies – sadly the democracy index proves this – it’s about defending our way of live and our freedom.

   With other words, the West needs to make sure to be strong enough to be independent of chinese products.

   As long as Chinese companies are defacto owned by the CCP, it doesn’t make any sense to let them buy western companies or to let them settle in the western world.

   Every effort to buy a chinese company is blocked by the CCP, why should we allow this then?

   Once this is reversed it might look better for us, but as long as it’s not the case, a potential conflict with Taiwan would be devastating.

   Once again, the US is the hegemon, following Neo-Realism, it predicts a time of unrest and wars once the hegemon is challenged by a new power.

   History proved this several times, there is no reason why it should be otherwise this time, because – once again – the international Institutions couldn’t even prevent a war like the Ukraine War.

   But let’s still assume that there wouldn’t be an all-out war between China and the US over taiwan, the consequences for europe would still be devastating and at the current state of europe it would probably lead to the downfall of Europe. Unless we would be willing to keep doing business with China, but this would 100% go against US interests and again, it’s about high/big politics, so they would make sure that Europe wouldn’t do business with them. At the end of the day, they have the longer lever.

2. Without being an expert on this but I don’t see how the Chinese could enforce a war while still being economically so reliant on exports to the west. Once their economy shifts towards consumption rather than export, much like the US’, then it would indeed be possible.

   What would it mean for us? Probably another wave of hefty inflation as “cheap” Chinese products are deeply embedded in our consumption culture.

   The financial sector will be impacted too, there are a number of banks here that use Luxembourg as their European hub, the impact will be significant yet not crucial I would say.

   Everything in life follows a mean-reversion principle, it is not the first time that a wave of globalization is replaced by an environment of protectionism.

3. If Taiwan-China escalates to hot conflict, you will have bigger problems, don’t worry.

4. Laurent Mosar would be all over the place

5. A lot of desperate real estate agents…

6. Not going to happen, China would never attack Taiwan. For them Taiwan is their people and they don’t want to attack them. Also they don’t want to destroy the vital industry of Taiwan. At most I think they would try to send chinese “colonies” to Taiwan to kinda like Israel in Palestine.

7. I do agree that we tend to believe the US here all too easily given their record of meddling and false prextexts to begin a conflict.
   So i appreciate feedback from a chinese source to balance impressions a bit out.