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For more than 75 years, China has been waiting.
Waiting for an island just 130 kilometres off its coast.
An island that Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly said must eventually be reunited with the mainland.
For decades, this conflict simmered in the background. The world largely assumed the problem could be managed.
Now that assumption is starting to look less certain.
In his 2026 New Year address, Xi declared that reunification with Taiwan was “unstoppable.”
Chinese military aircraft have crossed previously respected boundaries around Taiwan in record numbers, while military drills and patrols around the island have become increasingly routine.
For most of the world, that might sound like a regional dispute happening on the other side of the Pacific.
But if China launched an attack tomorrow, the people affected wouldn’t just be in Taipei.
They might be in Texas. Or California. Or Ohio.
And that’s because Taiwan sits at the centre of one of the busiest trade routes on Earth. It produces the vast majority of the advanced computer chips that power everything from militaires to the device you’re watching this video on right now.
A war involving China, Taiwan, and the United States could wipe more than $10 trillion from the global economy in a single year.
That’s larger than Covid. Larger than the Global Financial Crisis.
This is the story of the war that could break the world economy.
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