At a recent summit in San Francisco, Chinese President Xi Jinping openly stated that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China. According to the officials present at the meeting in question, Xi told Biden that China would prefer a peaceful reunification. Nonetheless, were that impossible, according to the anti-secession law passed in 2005, China would be compelled to act militarily. Military action is, in fact, what Beijing has been threatening Taiwan with for years now. The “ambiguous” strategy adopted by the US, where Taiwan was not formally recognised as an independent state but military support in case of invasion was implicitly a given, allowed for a precarious equilibrium. However, things seem to be changing. First and foremost, China’s attitude towards Taiwan has become increasingly more aggressive.
Over recent years Beijing has carried out many intimidating actions including the firing of ballistic missiles and ships running drills that mimicked a blockade of Taiwan. The gravity of the latter becomes clear when it is considered that Taiwan imports over 60% of its food and 98% of its energy from China; a blockade would clearly have catastrophic consequences for the Island. These actions, considered in the “grey zone”, that is military actions short of invasion or declaration of war, have been China’s way to keep the threat of war a constant reminder for Taiwan and to test international will to interfere. Importantly, the threatening and interfering approach has gone far beyond military actions. On the daily, Taiwan’s institutions and financial bodies are barraged with cyber-attacks by a hacking group affiliated with the Chinese government. These attacks targeted Taiwan’s flourishing economy and sent the message that China would be able to crash it.
The renewed attempt to undermine Taiwan also has a political aspect to it. For nearly a decade from 2008 until 2016, there was a tacit agreement between the parties to not compete for official diplomatic recognition by other countries. However, Beijing seems to have abandoned this approach in favour of putting pressure on Taiwan’s allies to embrace the “One China” policy. It did so during the abovementioned summit, where Chinese officials asked their American counterparts for a statement by the America president declaring the US does not support Taiwanese independence. Although the request was firmly rejected, this attempt shows China’s intentions to strong-arm the rest of the world into politically isolating Taiwan. A great ally of China’s campaign against Taiwan’s independence has been the pro-China propaganda that floods public debate in Taiwan. It is in light of Beijing’s renewed aggressive and proactive approach to the Taiwan issue that the recent comments made have caused worries in the West. It is especially so given the evolving circumstances in which this development is taking place.
China’s reinvigorated determination to unify Taiwan with the mainland can be attributed to different factors. Firstly, the developments within Taiwan probably put China on the edge. In fact, after having been a military dictatorship, which to an extent agreed to be part of China, Taiwan transitioned into a flouring democracy led by a pro-independence progressive party. It also managed to carve itself an important place in world economy. With its prosperity and freedoms, it is not hard to imagine that China perceives it as a threat to its own model of governance, which might influence people within its borders. Now with elections fast approaching and the concrete possibility of the pro-independence party winning and declaring independence, China’s urgency to reunite Taiwan with the mainland reignited.
Importantly, the question of war for China obviously turns on the likelihood of winning. Crucially, not of winning against Taiwan, which it decisively would, but against the US and its allies. In fact, what has hold off China in these years has been the prospect of entering a war with the US, against which its chances of winning were less clear. However, as China grows stronger, the risk of war increases. China’s spending on military was significantly increased over the years to the point where US superiority is now in question. For example, China’s navy already has more ships than America’s. Furthermore, the glimmer of victory that China seems to be seeing is also due to the other conflicts taking place in Europe and the Middles east, which are taking a tool on US’s ability to act as the “world’s police”.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the proxy war that followed, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas have tested the West’s political and financial ability to tackle internal and external issues. As we have seen in recent days, the consensus for financial support both in the Middle East and in Ukraine is wearing thin. The instability experienced within their own borders left Western governments unable to justify considerable spending for proxy wars. What is more, the rise of nationalist political groups is likely to sway public opinion further against the current approach of support and solidarity. This is exacerbated by Taiwan’s clear inability to defend itself, which resulted from years of bad defence strategy and investments in weapons that might be inoffensive against today’s China. The risk of being seen as a “lost cause” against China might further hinder consensus for Western support.
As a result, China might see this favourable political climate as an opportunity to make a move. It is, however, argued that there would still be a strong economic incentive for the West to protect Taiwan, more than to side with Israel or Ukraine. More than 60% of the world’s semiconductors, which power everything from phones to missiles, and 90% of the most advanced sort, is produced in Taiwan. It has been estimated that a war in Taiwan, or a blockade, would cost the world economy more than $2trn. Furthermore, were Taiwan to officially become part of China, the latter would massively benefit from it, leaving the West at an even greater disadvantage on the world stage.
On its own end, whilst partly invigorated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China would also have to consider the issues faced by Russia, in what it probably envisioned as a much quicker military operation than it turned out to be. It would also have to factor in the peculiar difficulties of holding an attack across 160km of water, which is distinctively harder than crossing a land border. China would also have to be prepared for an unexpectedly strong and united support from the West, which might still ultimately have more to lose from allowing China to invade Taiwan than from defending it. Crucially, China would also have to deal with the strict economic sanctions that it would inevitably face whilst pursuing the stated goal of doubling its economy.
To conclude, it appears clear that the concrete possibility of Taiwan’s official independence, combined with the seemingly fertile political and financial climate for a weak Western response to an invasion, has reignited China’s ambition to unify Taiwan with mainland China. Notwithstanding this, China still has to factor in the West’s economic interest in preserving Taiwan’s independence, the likelihood that the military operation might take longer than expected and the inevitable impact that an attack on Taiwan would have on China’s political and, most importantly, economic goals. In light of this, although a successful invasion of Taiwan might seem more feasible now than in the past, it is still arguably unlikely that China will take any significant action in that direction in the nearby future.
By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations
