"Beijing has been quite stunned at the extent of the cooperation between Europe and America on sanctions against America. The calculation ... before the invasion was that Europe and America would be divided, and America would slap a few sanctions on but it wouldn't really be game-changing ..." - John Lee (Hudson Inst)
"The Chinese now realize that if there's any kind of war, for example over Taiwan, the high likelihood is that the Americans would get global cooperation to start imposing extremely harsh particularly financial sanctions on the Chinese, and that would devastate the Chinese economy"
Only the Americans tend to do war well over more than one of the 4 domains (land sea air cyber). China and Russia have high impressive numbers in military costs and equipment but haven't really invested that much in logistics and organization and coordination across domains. So its great for them to have all these weapons but if they can't actually use them in a coordinated way ...
Unlike Russia, China still seeks to be known as a legitimate or respected leader. You can't do that just by material power alone. It would have to get other country's to accept its ownership over Taiwan for that, it couldn't just start bombing Taiwan. So the Chinese are now thinking How do we do that?
The Covid19 pandemic began a process of diversification away from China. And factoring in the real political risk of being so reliant on China.
Russia is a massive surplus producer and exporter of food stuffs and energy. China is the world's largest importer of all of that, especially for the imports necessary to grow food. The sanctions placed on Russia if placed on China would lead to a de-industrialization of the entire Chinese system in under a year, according to Ziehan.
Boycotts. Shareholders, consumers can take a stand to change corporate policy. That's a surprise to China, according to Zeihan.