Land war? Who said anything about a land war? This would be a two-pronged war: a war of orbital+information supremacy (probably, but we don't even know the full evolution of internal military doctrine in 2023); and an insurrectionist war.

Specifically, the goal from the Western perspective wouldn't be to "fight China" as one coherent entity, but rather specifically to erase the CCP from existence. A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.

This would be done presumably by:

1. trying to pump information and agent-provocateurs into China, to get China's own people on the same page the rest of the world is on that's making them want to go to war; to get the Chinese people to — at least partially — disavow the CCP as representing their interests. (Seems like this is already well on its way, and has been going on for about a decade now.)

2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.

3. being friendly with the Taiwanese government, and having them ready and briefed to step in when a plug-and-play APT-delivered information campaign triggers that will see them installed them back as the "rightful government of China" — without any of them having to step foot off the safety of their island.

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A tangent about technology and doctrine:

Every war the US (and partners like Britain) has fought since WW2, every proxy war, every time they've given weapons to allies — the US has been not using its strategic arsenal for these things, in order to not show its hand to bigger enemies.

But China is the bigger enemy. No need to hide anything.

> They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines

So, okay, there's a thing you have to recognize that goes on in the world — the declassification treadmill. Technologies become public, stories become declassified, etc. at exactly the point where the government involved in their classification, no longer thinks that there's any competitive advantage in keeping the technology secret. This might be because their opponents now all also have the technology. But it's more-often the point where the government involved has moved on to bigger and better things.

We got a lot of declassification of nuclear technology and history back in the 1970s. (But going so far as to allow that history to be made into a major 2023 motion picture? Well, that's a taunt: basically making fun of your rivals for still thinking nukes pose any threat to you at all.)

The public — and not just the American public — got access to GPS in the 1980s. And to very precise GPS in the 2000s. Do you know what that means? It's a tacit statement that the US military doesn't consider GPS-guided [or BeiDou-guided] ICBMs a viable threat any more, either!

What does a threat look like? Well, it might be something both the US and China secretly have, and will both pull out and go to war with. Or it might be something only the US has. But from the US's posturing, it seems a lot like it's a thing — several things — that only the US has. A thing that China knows or at least suspects the US has, where having this thing is more than enough to entirely subdue China from taking certain aggressive foreign-policy positions.

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> nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes

Well, no, of course that's not why anyone would actually bother. The Western goal is to pop China like a pinata and get all the candy that falls out. Not to invade/colonize, per se, but rather to interface directly with the Chinese people as a trading partner, without an insular and ethno-nationalist Chinese government setting the terms. To unplug the propaganda machine that makes Chinese tourists never bother to visit Western countries (except in insular, state-managed tour groups.)

A crime like genocide is just a defensible moral justification that everyone in the room in the UN could agree on, as a signal to get started on the project.

It's like if some awful billionaire who lives in your small town in his mansion with armed guards, one day killed his own wife, and everyone in town found out. From one perspective, it's "his family's internal business." But from another perspective, it's a defensible moral justification to everyone else in town finally forming a posse to storm his mansion, haul him out, do unspeakable things to him, and then auction off everything he owns! (Will his armed guards stop you? Maybe if he's still alive... but what if you could kill him at the very start? Maybe they'd admit they'd been waiting for you to do that for years, and they'll be glad to be off to a new job!)