While the Pentagon warns of a looming 2027 conflict, the strategic “payoff matrix” tells a different story.

From coastal vulnerability to the “Game of Chicken” with Japan, here is why Beijing is playing a much longer—and more cautious—game.

The drumbeat of war in the Taiwan Strait has become a staple of Western geopolitical forecasting. With military drills intensifying and the 2027 “Davidson Window” approaching, the narrative seems set: China is preparing for a historic military gambit.

But according to Professor Djangu Chin, a Yale-educated game theory expert based in Beijing, this narrative fails the test of rational logic. To Chin, the idea of a near-term invasion isn’t just unlikely—it is “idiocy.”

Using the cold mathematics of game theory, Chin argues that China’s domestic........

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