Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

Life After Death

Belief in life after death is an interesting choice to compare religiosity. 

It is a belief shared by all of the widely adhered to religions in the region without being strictly tied to any one of them, and also captures residual metaphysical beliefs in contrast to metaphysical naturalism among people who are nominally non-religious and may have a problem with particular denominational or institutional religious structures but not with a somewhat religious worldview at a broad level.

The percentage of people believe in life after death considerably exceeds the percentage of people who regularly attend religious services or pray regularly. But it is below 50% in most of the historically predominantly Christian countries  of Europe, and just barely above 50% in several of the remaining ones in the face of a long term trend towards declining belief in an afterlife. Most of Europe is majority secular, or very nearly so. In the homelands of most of my ancestors, belief in an afterlife is less than 40%.

Related from a May 12, 2016 post:

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be.

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance.

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.” 

The Data

Belgium, Moldova, Ireland and Kosovo are omitted, presumably for a lack of statistically significant amounts of data. Vatican City is almost omitted but one presumes that this belief is near 100% among its couple thousand permanent residents.

Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey are the only countries on the map over 60%. 

The lowest rates are in Bulgaria (25%) and Albania (22.7%), presumably as legacies of communism in places where religious institutions didn't play a large role in their emergence as non-communist states, and where the juxtaposition of these states against their Muslim neighbors, made an emphasis on state imposed atheism more salient.

In Turkey this is due to an overwhelmingly Muslim population. In Bosnia, the 51% of the population that is Muslim brings up the average. Predominantly Muslim Kosovo is probably higher than the 65.9% of Bosnia, but due to its long membership of nominally secular communist Yugoslavia and a somewhat larger non-Muslim minority, is probably less than teh 91.8% of Turkey. 

Poland is predominantly Catholic and the only predominantly Christian country on the map over 60%. This makes sense as Catholicism played an important and recent role in its departure from its former Communist regime, less than half a century ago.

Below Poland, but above 50% are Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and Macedonia, with a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox adherents and a range of economic development and historical ties to the Western and Eastern economic blocks of the Cold War. And, more generally, there doesn't seem to be a strong Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox skew to the likelihood of believing in life after death among Europeans in predominantly Christian countries. 

Belgium probably splits the difference between France (41.2%) and the Netherlands (34%) and is probably under 40%. 

Moldova probably splits the difference between Romania and Ukraine, which are also former Eastern block countries that were historically Eastern Orthodox, and is probably close to Romania than Ukraine and may be a bit over 50%.

I don't have a great intuition regarding where Ireland falls. It is probably under 60%, but probably higher than the U.K. (41.7%), as it is one of the more religious observant Christian countries in Europe, and Catholicism played a major role in sustaining Irish culture in the face of centuries of English rule in 1921 (now more than a century ago). It is probably in the high 40s or low 50s, percentage-wise.

Muslim v. Christian Approaches To Heresy

The very high rates in belief in life after death among Muslims is notable in light of a big difference in how Christianity and Islam have historically approached heresy at the individual level.

Christianity conceptualized heresy as an internal and subjective matter - not believing in the doctrinal truths of the established church.

Islam, in contrast, has focused on insisting that people outwardly comply with religious edicts concerning prayer, fasting, etc., without trying to punish or even really condemn people who are outwardly compliant with its demands even though subjectively, deep down, they have doubts or even outright don't believe in Islamic doctrines.

Yet, modern Islam has much higher rates of belief in the afterlife than modern European Christianity does, where the median rate of belief in the afterlife is probably half what it is among Muslims, if not a little lower.

Paces On The Path To Secular Humanism

Another possibility is that predominantly Islamic countries are simply on the same path towards secular humanism induced by modern scientific thinking and modern societal conditions as predominantly Christian countries, but are just less far along that path.

Many of the Islam driven doctrines and practices that are striking to us today in historically Christian countries, were once present in Christianity.

Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia is executing people for witchcraft now. Christians in Europe and North America were doing this into the 18th century. 

The last known execution for witchcraft in Europe was that of Anna Göldi in 1782 in Glarus, Switzerland, while in the British Isles, Janet Horne was the last person executed for witchcraft in 1727. The last known witchcraft trial in North America was held in Virginia in 1730, where a woman named Mary was convicted of using witchcraft to find lost items and sentenced to be whipped 39 times. There are still witchcraft persecutions (and lots of focus on fighting demons and exorcisms) among African Christians and animists.

Witchcraft prosecutions died, in part, because nobody believed that witchcraft was real any more.

Charging Interest

Islam prohibits the charging of interest now (although work around doctrines exist in Islamic finance to allow the equivalent of simple interest but not compound interest).

Interest was condemned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, in writings of the fathers of the Roman Catholic church during the Roman Empire, and by Luther and Calvin at least as late as the 16th century, although usury came to be redefined in Western Christianity as a bar only unfairly high interest rates and not charging interest at all, and became a minor issue for Christian clergy, with the established or formerly established Christian churches now relying on interest on their endowments to operate.

The gap in the focus on barring the charging of interest in the period between the Roman era and the Reformation, moreover, was as much due to the lack of banking activity entirely during the Middle Ages in Christendom, where feudalism prevailed, as it was due to a change in Christian religious doctrine in that time period, per se. 

Modesty

The Islamic world is known today for its greater expectations of modesty in how women dress, and its less equal treatment of women than in the modern Western world. But this too was recently a part of the Christian world, often with religious justification.

Certainly, there is a range of how this manifests within the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban impose absurdly strict modestly standards. American Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia, in contrast, are still more strict than modern Americans and Western Europeans, but are far less extreme than Saudi Arabians.

European and American styles of dress for women were common in Afghanistan and Iran in the 1970s, but this shift was rolled back in Islamic revolutions.

Still, Victorian England, and most predominantly Christian countries in that era, were similar in standards of female modesty to many Islamic countries today. In the early 19th century, women were still wearing swim wear that looked suspiciously similar to "burkinis" in Europe and the U.S. Women were still getting arrested and held in contempt of court for wearing pants in the United States, in the early 1900s. 

Not wearing a skirt or dress to school, even at the collegiate level, was something that women got in trouble for doing up to the early 1960s in the U.S., and skirts are still part of mandatory school uniforms for girls in Japan, much of Asia, and some places in the British Commonwealth.

Marriage

Polygamy and cousin marriage ended much sooner in countries that became Christian than it did in the Islamic world where it is still common in much of the Middle East, West Asia, South Asia, and Africa, although polygamy is banned in both Turkey and Tunisia as a matter of secular law and is quite rare in most Islamic countries. And, cousin marriage is not common in much of the Islamic world.

Polygamy has been very rare, outside the early Mormons in the 19th century and some small splinter Mormon sects after that, in places that have been predominantly Christian at the time, although tolerance for mistresses and concubines who are not Christian wives, instead of, or in addition to, Christian wives, has varied in European and Latin American history, and to a lesser extent until the early 19th century especially in places where slavery was permitted in North America and the Caribbean. Polygamy was at least as common as it is in modern polygamist countries in the Mediterranean world and Europe in the pagan era, and remains common today among animists in Africa.

In one exception to the trend, divorce has been allowed in Islam from the outset, while it was banned entirely until the 16th century, and was virtually non-existent in most Christian countries until the 19th century (with divorces generally only available from the legislature). Complete divorce bans for Christians existed in Ireland and Italy until a quite late date, and this is still the case in the Philippines.

Women's Rights

Mary Wollstonecraft was famously battling for women's rights in the U.K. and Europe in the 18th century. The Married Women's Property Acts that formally gave married women many private law rights and ended coverture law that absorbed women's private law personalities into their husbands were mostly passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is close to where women's rights in private law are today in many Islamic countries. Shi'ite Islamic communities have tended to be afford women greater rights than Sunni Islamic countries, although this may be more a matter of coincidence and local cultures and conditions than it is a matter of the doctrines of the religious sects, both of which vastly predate widespread democratic government.

Political Rights

The United States, at its independence in 1776, was one of the earliest and largest Republics since the fall of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (although the Swiss, Iceland, and some city states had it earlier). 

Constitutional monarchies afforded considerable democratic rights to a fairly narrow franchise of middle aged property owning white men in the U.K., but the British monarch had real power into the 19th century as the franchise was expanded by fits and starts there.

The French Revolution in 1789 was another early experiment in democratic government without a monarch, but this revolution was not stable with some form on monarchy persisting intermittently until 1870.

Most European and Latin American constitutional monarchies and republics arose in the late 19th century. The modal year at which European colonies with mostly non-European residents gained their independence in Africa and Asia was 1960, in most cases with Western style Republican government followed not many years after by military coups and dictatorships and multiple false starts before stable democratic government was established.

Much of the Islamic world was subject to European colonial rule for a long time. But outright strong monarchies now persist predominantly in the oil rich states of the Islamic world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco and Jordan are fairly close to where the British constitutional monarchy was at the time of the American Revolution. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have shed their monarchs for a while, but still struggle to make those republics stable multi-party democracies. The Middle East, generally, is still playing out the final acts of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which was formally dissolved with country lines redrawn after World War I, at a time when most of Europe and Latin America has republics. But World War II hit the reset button on democratic government in almost all of continental Europe, leading to the organization of new democratic regimes with the demise of most of them under fascism during World War II.

Eastern Europe and much of Africa and some of Latin America has Soviet style communist regimes until the fall end of the Cold War around 1989, and in some cases beyond, with holdouts like Cuba and Venezuela, and the post-communist era in these countries have only sometimes yielded multi-party democratic republics, and those that did persist still often have a political culture marked by authoritarian tendencies.

Women's Right To Vote

In the U.S. women's right to vote came late. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's right to vote at the national level was adopted only in 1920. Unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The U.S. was neither first nor last in the women's right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to allow a wide cross-section of women to vote in national elections in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and Denmark (including Iceland) in 1915. Many European countries followed in 1917 and 1918. But women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990.

Women has the right to vote in national elections in Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy, a predominantly Islamic country then and now, from 1919 to 1929.

Relative to the time that Islamic countries have become democratic republics, in the places where they have, women have gained the right to vote, if anything, sooner than they did in predominantly Christian countries, often from the outset.

China Is Unlikely To Start A War

With Russia knocked down a peg by its disastrous performance in the Ukraine War, Afghanistan fallen to the Taliban, none of the usual candidates in the Middle East coming forward publicly to try to pounce on Israel in the face of its intense response to an Iranian supported Hamas massacre and Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon, and North Korea lobbing nuclear ready missiles in tests but taking no conventional warfare steps and its leader shaking hands with South Korea's leader, all attention has turned to China.

As a country with 1.4 billion people, a gross national product that is 76% of the size of the U.S. GNP, and decades of intense economic growth, China's has had the resources to fund a large and advanced military, without even seriously militarizing its society with large numbers of soldiers relative to its population or seriously straining the ability of its government to pay for it. 

China's merely regional aspirations also allow it to concentrate its military resources. China hasn't tried to mimic the United States and Russia by deploying a large blue sea navy far from its coast, or by trying to serve as a "global policeman". China has some blue sea navy capabilities with modern aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and longer range than coastal submarine, it has long range missiles (some of which carry nuclear missiles), and it even has some reasonably long range military aircraft. But China has shown little interest in flexing its military muscles further from home than the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific Ocean, and the East China Sea. 

China certainly has no plans to invade any country in the Americas, or to repeat the mistake that Japan made in World War II when Japan attacked Hawaii in 1941.

There is no indication that China has any intention of starting hostilities to the North, with Russia or Mongolia or on its borders with the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia. 

Despite some border skirmishes over worthless, almost uninhabited mountain territory on its border with India, this conflict seems to be more about pride and honor than anything substantive. China shows no indication that it wants to seize meaningfully inhabited parts of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, or Myanmar. China seems to have bitten off as much as it can chew when it conquered Tibet and now thinks better of any other campaigns to repeat that experience.

China could easily have conquered the communist regimes in North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam outright, but appears to be content to merely leave them as tributary states in its sphere of influence that emulate it and kowtow to it. 

In part, China appears to have concluded from the troublesome resistance its has received from ethnic minorities in semiautonomous regions like Inner Mongolia, and from ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Manchurians, that it prefers to be a nation-state dominated by a Han Chinese core to being a sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural empire.

China doesn't really want to have to absorb Japan or North Korea or South Korea or Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or the Philippines or Indonesia or Thailand, let alone Australia or New Zealand or Papua New Guinea. 

China isn't even grumbling about trying to unify Chinese diaspora populations in Western influenced places with large Chinese minorities, like Singapore or Malaysia. It swallowed up Macao easily enough, when its 99 year lease expired, but has found that even trying to absorb Hong Kong without destroying what makes it valuable has been highly challenging, even when the British handed it over without a fight when its 99 year lease expired.

China has a large and technologically advanced Army ground forces with no place to go. It has state of the art tanks and anti-tank forces, but no plausible conflicts, other than an invasion of Taiwan or a campaign to put down North Korea's regime if it gets out of hand, to use it. 

It is conceivable that China might need to fight a counterinsurgency conflict in its own territory, or to aid one of its tributary states in doing so. But there is no way that any plausible insurgent force in these places could acquire "near peer" conventional military force weapons to its own forces in any meaningful amount in the foreseeable future.

The United States also has large, technologically advanced ground forces in its Army and Marines, but unlike China, it has used those ground troops as expeditionary military forces to fight foreign wars on a regular basis since at least World War I. China hasn't been involved directly in a foreign war on an expeditionary basis since World War II, even though it supported proxy Communist regimes in Korea and Southeast Asia.

Since the 1980s, China's military ambitions have focused largely on regaining control of Taiwan (which itself arrogantly claims sovereignty over mainland China, an ambition that has been futile for seven decades) and expanding its dominance in the portions of the seas near it, some closer to the Philippines and Japan than to its own coast, that the rest of the world considers to be international waters.

Taiwan is attractive because it is very close to mainland China, and it is predominantly ethnic Chinese, which makes it feel to the People's Republic of China like a territory that it could assimilate in a manner similar to its current effort to reintegrate Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China. 

The prospect of a military conquest of Taiwan is also attractive to China's military leadership, much as it is the military leadership of the United States, because it justifies immense expenditures for naval forces, air forces, and ground forces who can participate in an amphibious assault on the island of Formosa.

If China's barriers to this conquest were primarily military, it would have happened long ago. The People's Republic of China has something like 70 times more people than Taiwan does, vastly more economic resources, and can focus on this single front without fearing distractions from some other conflict at the same time. Taiwan's economy is more technologically advanced and developed than China's but that gap has fallen steadily, and when it comes to military technology, they are close to parity with China potentially having the edge at this point. Even if China had to incur three or even ten times the casualties as Taiwan did in an offensive war against it, ultimately, China has a greater capacity to bear those losses than Taiwan does. 

This said, however, one of the reasons that the last significant amphibious assault in the history of the world was seventy years ago in the Korean War is that military technologies have shifted in a way this makes this strategy which has always been extremely challenging and costly, even more difficult to carry out effectively. It is just too easy with modern anti-ship missiles, submarines, sea mines, and more to sink amphibious assault surface combatants with hundreds or even thousands of ground troops on them before they even reach the shore. And as military technologies mature and advance, the balance continues to shift, again and again, against warships and toward military forces that want to stop warships. Ukraine has managed to seriously bloody Russia's Black Sea fleet, despite not having any real navy to speak of at all.

Taiwan does have the United States, with the worlds largest and most advanced military force and nuclear weapons as it patron. But a reasonable Chinese military strategist could wager, and would probably be correct, that the United States, while it would provide as much support in conventional warfare to protect Taiwan as it could, would not be willing to start a global nuclear war with China to protect Taiwan's sovereignty, something that Taiwan itself blows hot and cold on in its own domestic politics. Likewise, while China would very much like to have Taiwan as a jewel in its crown, it seems unlikely that China would risk starting a nuclear war with the United States to get it. Nuclear missiles are blunt instruments that serve few legitimate military purposes in the hands of rational military leaders in positions of high command. And, unlike the leaders of North Korea, China's leaders have consistently shown themselves to be calculating and rational, rather than insane and reckless, for the last half century or so since the Cultural Revolution ended.

Instead, the main barrier to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is that fact that both countries "live in glass houses." Modern China's economy and prosperity is rooted in its export oriented manufacturing base, which is increasingly moving up the chain of technological sophistication. Taiwan, likewise, has an export based commercial economy that, most famously, it the global center of advanced computer processor manufacturing. China and Taiwan even have significant and strong trade ties with each other.

Unlike Russia, which has survived global economic sanctions and boycotts with only minor cuts and bruises so far, because the only exports that are very important to the health of Russia's domestic economy are natural gas and oil, both China and Taiwan have economies which are heavily reliant on international trade, much of it with rich Western countries. 

In an all out war, the sophisticated high tech factories that make that export based economy possible would be completely wiped out for decades in Taiwan, although the heavy capital investments of mainland China would be harder to really devastate. But it also isn't just physical capital investments that matter. You can't manufacture world class computer processors with unwilling serfs. The prime exports of both economies require the voluntary, and indeed, enthusiastic participation of legions of sophisticated engineers, factory managers, technicians, financial and managerial professionals, and more generally a health, decentralized, reasonably economically free commercial sector and social class. All it would take for China to kill the goose that lays Taiwan's golden eggs would be quiet work to rule, "quiet quitting" type behavior from its managerial, professional, administrative, and technical classes. No flashing explosives or armed resistance would be necessary.

Equally important, if any significant part of the developed world decided to boycott Chinese exports because of a Chinese invasion and conquest of Taiwan, as part of a general mobilization against it akin to the general mobilization against Russia that took place in the immediate wake of its invasion of Ukraine, the impact this would have on China would be far more severe than the impact these sanctions had on Russia.

China wouldn't lose all of its trading partners. It could still keep selling its ware to the communist regimes of Southeast Asia and to Russia, for example. But its trade to those countries is already close to maxed out, because it is a leading global exporter. There is no place it could sell its wares that could replace its immense exports to developed Western capitalist countries around the world, if it lost access to those markets, which it likely would, at least in the medium term.

The economic blowback that China would experience in reaction to an invasion of Taiwan from the developed Western capitalist countries of the world would be at least as bad as the Great Depression was in the United States, if not worse. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people would lose their jobs and would be trust into abject poverty. Factories up and down China's densely populated eastern coastal regions would be shuttered. People who managed to hold onto jobs might see their incomes cut in half. The massive progress China has made in the past couple of decades in eradicating extreme poverty globally would be undone.

In an economy already heavily driven by extravagant public works projects, there would be little room to boost an economy facing collapse from a sudden interruption of its export trade with more spending on public works and infrastructure. A loss of access to supplies of imported raw materials would further cripple Chinese manufacturers ability to export goods even communist or formerly communist countries that continued to support China, and to manufacture goods for domestic consumption. Imported comforts would dwindle to the consternation of Chinese business elites that now snap up second homes in Vancouver and foreign educations and travel for their children and have acquired expensive and exotic tastes. 

Also, despite its vast population, now more or less tied with India, in China, lives are no longer cheap. The average Chinese woman has less than one child in a lifetime. Many young men in China are not just only children, but are also the only grandchild of four grandparents. A historical preference for boys as China experienced its demographic transition in the face of its one child policy have left China with a surplus of military service aged men, although it has barely tapped it since it has so many young men relative to the needs of its military. 

China is far removed from places with the demographics of places like the Gaza Strip, where almost 50% of the population is under the age of eighteen, couples tend to marry in their early twenties, and women generally have many children in their lifetimes. Too many mouths to feed and too few jobs to support them isn't a problem that China has at the moment. Every young adult man and woman is precious in the eyes of modern China, so each life lost in a war to take Taiwan would have an amplified social impact. China is not psychologically prepared to lose the millions of lives and hundreds of sunken ships that it would have to expend to take Taiwan.

Given the current situation of China and Taiwan, the only way it would make sense for China to conquer Taiwan would be if it could accomplish this in an almost bloodless fait accompli in a matter of days, which the Taiwanese people collective gave up and accepted as inevitable at the outset, much like the sudden, nearly bloodless Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014 that was basically over before the world had time to react to it, or come to Ukraine's aid.

But while the Taiwanese people do predominantly speak a Chinese topolect, and do have strong cultural ties to mainland China, the similarities between Crimea and Taiwan end there. Modern Taiwan's is the product of a society of Western leaning exiles from the Maoist Communist revolution in mainland China. The Chinese speaking people of Taiwan are the majority and have been in opposition to the communist regime of mainland China from the start, unlike the Russian speaking people of Crimea who were a minority in Ukraine and felt cultural and political kinship with their post-Soviet co-ethnics in Russia proper. 

There is no reason to think that Taiwan would accept their new Chinese overlords quietly or peacefully with resignation and obedience to the new regime. This would be a war of people with nowhere else to go in Taiwan defending their home, who have been preparing for this fight for much longer than the Ukrainians prepared for a Russian invasion, and with all of the ferocity of the Ukrainians defending their territory. And, like Ukraine, the Taiwanese would have ample military and economic support from Western-leaning allies including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Australia with technologically modern military forces. So, the only scenario that would make the price that China would have to pay to take Taiwan simply isn't a plausible possibility.

Thus, the only ground war that China has shown any interest in fighting would be far too costly to China, even if it wins, to make the fight worth it to China. And, because China's leadership is rational and pragmatic enough to realize this fact, it is extremely unlikely that China will invade Taiwan.

Really the only military actions that it seems plausible for China to undertake in the near future is a continuation of its low grade, gradual efforts to use its naval and air power, and ground troops on artificial islands, to extend its dominance in the international waters of the East China sea and the Western Pacific as far as the international waters near the Philippines. The prizes here are fishing territory, oceanic mineral resources, greater control of the East Asian shipping industry, and national pride at a modest military cost. And, these are prizes which the allies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are unwilling to exert the level of overwhelming trade, diplomatic, and military power necessary to completely thwart China from achieving these aims.

Piracy So Far This Year

From here.

Piracy is pretty rare, with the map above providing, while not a complete list of incidents, a very large share of them, worldwide - many of which aren't that serious.

Many of the familiar piracy hotspots remain. The waters off the coast of West Africa are the worst. Southeast Asia is next.

But piracy has pretty much ended in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the adjacent parts of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, all of which have been places where there has been piracy in modern times. Also, the incidents in India, Mozambique and Brazil on the map involved ships docketed in port, not at sea.

UPDATE August 4, 2023: The tranquility of the Persian Gulf with respect to piracy needs to come with a caveat, however. The Iranian military is a genuine threat to civilian shipping in the Persian Gulf and its immediate vicinity, and has been involved in numerous incidents of illegitimate hostile acts towards both military and civilian ships there, but this doesn't count as piracy because piracy, by definition, involves non-state actors.