Seeing this title, I don't know if it will make many people scoff, thinking that it is a title party, brushing the hydrology of the flow. Not really! There is no technical insurmountable difficulty in filling the Taiwan Strait, and the tactics are similar to the ancient siege warfare, filling in the moat. Today, we will seriously analyze whether it is feasible to "fill in the strait and liberate Taiwan" from both technical and tactical aspects.
(Since ancient times, the moat has been an important support for urban defense, and now the sea on all sides is Taiwan's defensive support, and it is also the biggest natural obstacle for the People's Liberation Army to liberate Taiwan and unify the motherland.)
In order to fill in the Taiwan Strait, we must first study the geographical conditions of the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Strait is located between The Island of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, extending vertically in a "northeast-southwest" manner, with a total length of about 400 kilometers and an area of about 90,000 square kilometers, the strait is wide in the south and narrow in the north, the width of the south mouth is about 400 kilometers, the width of the north mouth is about 200 kilometers, and the narrowest point of the strait is about 130 kilometers.
(Taiwan Island and the Taiwan Strait, don't ask me what the distance ruler in the middle means, I don't understand, I don't know, I don't dare to ask)
Originally connected to the mainland, Taiwan Island was originally connected to the mainland, and since about 12,000 years ago, due to the end of the fourth season of the glacial period, the geological structure has changed, and the land in the middle of the strait has gradually sunk, and Taiwan has gradually become an island in the sea from a part of the mainland. However, there is still a continental shelf connection between Taiwan Island and the mainland, so the average depth of the Taiwan Strait is only about 60 meters, and the deepest place is only 88 meters, with the current level of technology, to fill the sea at this depth, there is no problem in the project, not to mention that China is a well-known "infrastructure demon".
(Reclamation in the South China Sea is a deep-sea reclamation island, and "reclamation" in the Taiwan Strait is not a concept.)
However, this kind of reclamation project in Taiwan may not be the same as our reclamation of islands in Nansha. Since 2013, China has successively built 7 artificial islands in Nansha, and the sand dredging ship "Tian Whale", which is specially used to fill the island, once became a "net red" and was called a "Chinese heavy weapon". However, that is in the sea to fill the island, because the cost of transporting sand and gravel from land to fill the island is too high, and the land rock is easily eroded by barnacles, shellfish and other organisms in the sea, so most of the sea reclamation islands are dug out of the sediment deep in the seabed by sand dredging boats, mixed with special adhesives, stirred well, and then poured on the reef plate of the original island reef, thus forming a new island.
(The Taiwan Strait reclamation project is more like this: sand and gravel are transported from the mainland, poured into the sea, are built, and then widened to form roads that allow pedestrians and vehicles to pass.)
Reclamation in the Taiwan Strait obviously cannot be used in this way, because our purpose is to "reclaim the sea", you dig out all the sediment on the seabed, what else do you take to reclaim the sea? Therefore, the way to reclaim the sea in the Taiwan Strait is similar to barrage and damming, that is, using engineering vehicles to continuously throw the stone mined on land, including large cement piers and other materials made by hand, directly into the sea to fill up, and then slowly pile up a that can pass, so as to continuously push forward, all the way to the main island of Taiwan. And The Fujian across from Taiwan itself is densely forested, there is no shortage of large stones, while the mountain blasting stone can also make cement, and pour large cement piers, cement piers are more suitable for reclamation projects than ordinary stones, so from the technical point of view and China's current infrastructure capacity, reclamation, construction of a road directly to Taiwan, there is no technical difficulty.
(The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, a two-way six-lane bridge deck, is enough to resist the invasion of a 16-level typhoon, and in the future, the Taiwan Strait can also be built in accordance with this standard, and its cost is much lower than that of simple reclamation, and the progress of the project is also faster)
"Reclamation" in the Taiwan Strait is not to completely fill in the entire Taiwan Strait, all we have to build is one or more passages that can pass through the mainland to Taiwan. However, considering the water depth of the Taiwan Strait, land reclamation is obviously a huge project, and its total construction volume far exceeds the cost and construction volume of China's reclamation of several islands in the South China Sea. Such a large project, even if we have no problems in the project, but in terms of construction costs are still sky-high. At this point, we can refer to the "Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge", which has been completed and opened to traffic, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge was built at the mouth of the Pearl River, with an average water depth of 37 meters; the bridge tunnel of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge has a total length of 55 kilometers, of which the main bridge is 29.6 kilometers, and the Hong Kong Port to the Zhuhai-Macao Port is 41.6 kilometers; the bridge deck is a two-way six-lane highway with a design speed of 100 kilometers per hour, and the total construction cost of such a bridge is about 126.9 billion yuan.
(The flag is already standing...) ）
The average width of the Taiwan Strait is about 250 kilometers, which is more than 5 times that of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, and the average water depth of the Taiwan Strait is 66 meters, which is close to about 2 times the average water depth of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, so the cost of reclaiming land in the Taiwan Strait will most likely exceed 1 trillion yuan! Therefore, the cost is the biggest difficulty. However, in order to reduce the difficulty of engineering construction and save unnecessary expenses, in fact, we can adopt a "road-bridge mix-and-match" design scheme similar to the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge: that is, reclaiming land in shallow places on both sides of the mainland and Taiwan to build roads for vehicles, while in the deep-water area of the middle section of the Taiwan Strait, the construction cost is reduced by erecting a cross-sea bridge, and the construction progress of the project can be improved. And we can also consider directly upgrading the road and bridge mixing scheme across the Taiwan Strait from a simple highway bridge to a public and railway dual-use bridge, after all, the "National Comprehensive Three-dimensional Transportation Network Planning Outline" released in March this year has clearly defined the plan to repair high-speed rail to Taiwan Island, then the Taiwan Strait Cross-Sea Bridge may already be in the demonstration.
(Beijing-Taiwan high-speed railway, with a total investment of more than 400 billion yuan, the mainland is by no means just talking)
Of course, having said that, some friends will ask: What if the Taiwan side prevents the mainland from building a cross-sea bridge by attacking the construction site of the road and bridge? What if it does come to this point? Only by letting the Platon Army come forward and use rockets and the other side to "reason" is gone! After all, the liberation of Taiwan is very likely to be fought, and if we are not prepared for war, we will naturally not easily say such bold words as "filling in the Taiwan Strait."