Could the US take over China in a war?

That's a maybe, and only for the moment, if at all. China is now the 2nd largest economy in the world (bumping Japan down to the 3 spot), they're the largest exporter in the world (overtaking Germany this past year), and they buy more cars than anyone else (beating the US this past year). The Chinese economy has now rebounded to the point where they're experiencing double digit growth, the US is barely on the positive side of the equation.

I read in The Atlantic a few years ago (2005 I think) that the actual size of the Chinese economy is way overstated. Mainly because many of the figures provided are given by the Chinese themselves who have every reason to inflate the scope of their economic power.

You are still talking about a nation that once you get away from the coasts, is largely a third world country.

China is still facing massive demographic problems in the upcoming decades as literally hundreds of millions of citizens age and move out of their productive part of their lives and are not replaced due to the Chinese "one child" policy.

So, your information's five years old.

Many of the figures can be checked objectively, however, with no need to rely on official government figures.

Yeah, and one that the members of the G8 are desperately trying to convince to join the G8 (thus making them the G9), but China refuses to do so (because it makes it easier for them to crank out cheap goods). The Chinese are also industrializing at an incredibly rapid pace. Presently they are building more power plants in a year than exist in the whole of England.

The "one child" policy was not tightly enforced in the more remote parts of the country, and they're already reversing it and pressuring people to have more kids in some of the larger cities. Probably about the time China has to seriously worry about their being too many old people around, will be the time when automation systems are sophisticated enough to obviate the need for humans almost completely.

Automation never eliminates the need of humans "almost completely".

But that isn't fully the issue. The older a workforce gets, there is a massive tendency toward conservatism and risk avoidance. Forty five year old workers don't take as many risks in order to improve and innovate that 25 year olds do.

There are factories in Japan where the only workforce consists of a handful of repairmen. Every other job in that factory having been replaced by automation. Companies are aggressively pursuing automation development, since it tends to be cheaper than humans.

Big deal. Most of the technology that Japan became famous for was not invented in Japan, but in the US. They just put the final spit and polish on it and sold it cheap.

No way. China's huge both geographically & population wise. So, NO, the U.S. couldn't take over China. The U.S. would have trouble in a full scale war with Iran. For the same 2 reasons: geography & population. Air war can only do so much.

Does the U.S. have ground soldiers numbering half a million plus? Didn't think so.

Actually, total U.S. Army is over half a million. Combined with the Marine Corps plus reserves for ground forces and I believe the number comes to well over one million.

Of course, any large scale war with China would involve a prolonged build up period.

I believe that assuming the American people supported the war (which you could not fight anyway if they did not) then you could probably triple that number within a few years to more than three million.

The Chinese know karate, so no, the US has no chance of occupying China.

No, and any General that said we could and pressed the issue would be relieved from duty.

Ask McArthur.

Yay! War!

That wasn't why MacArthur was relieved of duty.

And remember that when he took office in 1953, President Eisenhower threatened to do almost exactly what MacArthur had suggested three years earlier.

The war ended soon thereafter.

Sure it was - he wanted to expand the war and wouldn't shut up about it. He was relieved.

A diplomatic threat by the President of the United States to use nuclear weapons is a different matter than a general of the United States calling for general war against the PRC. One was a diplomatic threat, the other was a plan of action.

It was even different in scope. It's well known McArthur wanted to use strategic nuclear weapons throughout China, bombing no less than 20 cities.

Eisenhower was talking about using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Northern Korea.

MacArthur's being relieved was because he made his disagreements with Truman public.

And Eisenhower ordered the dropping of live nuclear bombs into the Pacific Ocean to emphasize his threat.

I would call that far more than a "diplomatic threat".

MacArthur wanted to do more than that. He wanted to dump radioactive material all along the 38th parallel and was apparently sending panic stricken missives to Truman almost constantly. MacArthur also promised Truman that nothing he was planning on doing would entice the Chinese to join the war. That didn't work out so well for him.

Re: Japan:

Far more of a naval war than a land war, and encompassed the Pacific, not Asia.

And ended only via the use of nuclear weapons.

Thereby my original point stands. The United States would be very unlikely to be able to invade and hold China without using nuclear weapons. The logistics alone would be extremely difficult.

You dismiss conflicts such as the invasion of the Philippines and the Battle for Manila (one of the hardest fought city battles in world history).

You and most people here are thinking like conventional tacticians. The Chinese population is mostly confined to their eastern seaboard. Obliterating its majority and the bulk of its military installations with Hydrogen bombs could easily cripple them if that's what we REALLY wanted to do, which right now would not really benefit us at all.

I do think however that the days of conventional man on man war action is coming to an end. The future of warfare will be technological weapons based, rather than man on man-based. As scary as this is, I don't think I need to remind anyone of the moral implications of such warfare evolution. If we remove the human equation, much of the moral relativity concerning rules of war will decay among the general population, as it already is now. How many random people can you find on the streets who say, pull out of Iraq and just obliterate the whole damned place; we can do it. And for better or worse, we CAN do it. Something to think about, or at least take a few minutes to worry over.