Will Xi Jinping Invade Taiwan? Not if He Can Help It | Opinion

A breach of the median line in the Taiwan Strait used to be a very rare occurrence. According to CNN, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) only violated the unofficial marker three times between 1999 and 2020, often in response to high-level U.S. officials visiting the self-ruled island for meetings with their Taiwanese counterparts. The breaches usually consisted of a batch of PLA fighters and bombers hovering in what Taiwan refers to as its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), causing the Taiwanese to mobilize their own air force and anti-aircraft systems.

However, it's increasingly clear China no longer regards such breaches as particularly novel events. PLA fly-overs into Taiwan's ADIZ are now normalized, and Beijing's strategy of constantly testing the island's defenses is causing significant strain on a Taiwanese air force already suffering from a shortage of fighter pilots. In the first eight months of this year, there have been more than 600 PLA incursions, a nearly 70 percent increase from the same period last year. This number doesn't account for the multi-day PLA exercises around Taiwan that were conducted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip last week, which included everything from live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait to ballistic missile launches—some of which reportedly flew over the island and landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone.

For the national security community in Washington, the trends are ominous at best and disturbing at worse. China is not only using its considerable military capacity to browbeat Taiwan into submission, but also actively preparing to use force in a bid to reunify the island with the mainland. The military drills that took place in six separate zones around Taiwan, the logic goes, were therefore not only an intimidation tactic but a purposeful test run on how a hypothetical Chinese invasion of the island would unfold. A blockade scenario, whereby PLA ships place a stranglehold on Taiwan and PLA aircraft establish a virtual no-fly zone to military and commercial air traffic in the area, is viewed as a plausible option for the PLA to grind down Taiwanese defenses in preparation for a full takeover.

As one might expect, different U.S. agencies have different assessments about when, or if, China's President Xi Jinping will give the green-light on a possible Taiwan military operation. Before his retirement last year, Adm. Phil Davidson, the former combatant commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the PLA could try to seize Taiwan militarily as soon as 2027. Some in the U.S. intelligence community are warning of such an operation in the next year and a half, while others, like Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doubted Beijing would attempt to do so over the next two years.

Whoever proves to be right, the U.S. isn't waiting around. The so-called porcupine strategy, in which the U.S. provides Taiwan with anti-sea, anti-air, reconnaissance, and coastal defense weaponry required to make a possible Chinese invasion of the island as costly as possible, is now dictating how Washington responds to Taipei's requests for weapons. And there have been quite a few requests over the last several years; the Trump and Biden administrations have notified Congress of approximately $20 billion in arms sales to Taiwan since 2017. The sales are, in part, meant to send a message to Beijing that a military operation against Taiwan would be so costly and destructive to its own forces that it's best to stand down and resolve cross-Strait issues through peaceful means.

China's President Xi Jinping gives a speech
China's President Xi Jinping gives a speech. SELIM CHTAYTI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Ironically, China doesn't want a war either. While Taiwan's incorporation with the Chinese mainland is a central plank of Xi's national rejuvenation campaign, he would still prefer reunification to happen diplomatically. The Chinese Communist Party reiterated this decades-long stance this week in an official white paper, which used the phrase "peaceful reunification" 36 different times. The PLA's impressive military modernization campaign notwithstanding, Xi appears to understand that forceful reunification wouldn't be pretty, would likely cause China's neighbors, Japan especially, to rapidly rearm, and would undermine a Chinese economy that is still dependent on exports and access to the Western market.

Yet one would be remiss not to state the obvious: Just because China prefers to avoid the military option doesn't mean it won't pursue such a route if it concludes peaceful reunification is no longer possible. This week's white paper said as much, arguing that while peaceful reunification was still the priority, China "will not renounce the use of force, and reserve the option of taking all necessary measures." Unfortunately for Beijing, support for reunification among the Taiwanese public is paltry, with a little more than 1 percent of Taiwanese supporting it as soon as possible and a little more than 6 percent supporting unification at some later date.

While it's difficult to assess all of the factors that could compel Xi to go down the route of military force, Taiwan's formal declaration of independence would undoubtedly move him in this direction. Taiwanese independence would be the geopolitical equivalent of a massive tidal wave. The Taiwanese public surely understands this, which is why a plurality of respondents in the National Chengchi University survey want to stick with the status-quo arrangement indefinitely. As the old saying goes, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

The problem is that there may come a point in time when Xi concludes the status-quo is changing to China's disadvantage. Events like Speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan will do nothing to alleviate this—if anything, they will only harden Xi's resolve to eventually do what was previously thought to be unthinkable.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Uncommon Knowledge

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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