There is some truth to this. We don't want to have to find out though since this will go nuclear as soon as military operations start to affect mainland China. They will launch first and then hope for the best. They know they will only have one shot at it.

There will be no time for the "free world" to meet and decide how to respond since it will be every man for himself at that point. There will be no true winners.

When the dust settles, most of the world's population, including everyone north of the equator, will be dealing with the fallout of something that did not have to happen.

If anything of American society remains then they will find themselves needing to manage their own affairs with no central government or services to fall back on. Other adversaries may try to land forces here to sweep across the nation while we are down. It will be up to us to stop them and to restore some local semblance of law and order so that we can all organize a strong defense.

China doesn't have the industrial ability to build a navy strong enough to counter the US Navy so they have to carry out these intelligence operations in order to identify any exploitable weaknesses in communications infrastructure, military capabilities, etc. They have the manpower that they can call on to conduct a large scale invasion of Taiwan but they have no way at the moment to transport them to the island in large enough numbers to hold a beachhead. They are rapidly expanding their landing craft fleet though and their "civilian" navy is large. We need to arm Taiwan to the point where it is obvious that any attempt to float an invasion fleet across the straights will be a disaster. We also need to maintain regular patrols through the South China Sea including past all of the recently fortified islands claimed and manned by China so that we have the assets in position to mount a credible defense and to deny China the opportunity to prevent reinforcements or to blockade the island.

We have gamed this many times over the years but all things considered, we wasted the opportunity to prevent it entirely. Had we taken economic steps to prevent the growth of China's economy and the strong dependence of the west on cheap Chinese products by bringing industries back onshore in the US and Europe then we could have moderated their growth in a more controlled fashion instead of dumping cash into their economy that effectively set us up as the financiers of our own destruction. Today, we are looking at the near certainty, unless Xinping is replaced, of a war with China after several decades of allowing them to make up a huge technological deficit by stealing intellectual property on a huge scale so they could turn it against us. We can always strike first. That would make us the asshole though so it is better that we exhaust every other option before pushing those other buttons while we scramble to produce things we developed years ago but put on the back burner since there was no pressing need for them against less capable adversaries.

Like the Russians, China can throw millions of men at any adversary and many of those men know, because of the One Child policy, that there is a demographic situation where they will never marry or have families. The next 10 years will be quite interesting.