Xi may see an open conflict as too big a risk to take — especially if the threat of one is enough to help him achieve his broader geostrategic aims.
Xi may see an open conflict as too big a risk to take — especially if the threat of one is enough to help him achieve his broader geostrategic aims.
A s the Russia–Ukraine war has played out, many observers have wondered what its course might tell us about a future conflict between Taiwan and China.
Even before the Russian invasion, the PRC was taking a more aggressive posture toward neighboring Taiwan. After years of increased military spending, militarization of the South China Sea, and regional belligerence, Beijing had begun ramping up military violations of Taiwanese airspace and aggressive diplomatic efforts to further isolate the island nation.
Since the war in Ukraine began, there has been much analysis of the PRC’s intentions — of what lessons it might learn from the world’s response to Russia’s invasion, and how those lessons might inform its future actions toward Taiwan. And it is true that the conflict has much to teach Beijing: If the PRC’s military strategists had planned an invasion on the assumption that Taiwan would rapidly collapse when attacked, they should be rethinking that assumption now.
But Beijing isn’t the only interested party that can learn from the current conflict. Taiwan has seen the way in which the resolve and courage of the Ukrainian people and their leaders have unified much of the world and allowed Ukraine to mount a fierce resistance to Russia. And Taiwan’s friends, including the U.S., have learned the value of allied solidarity, coordinated action, strategic intelligence disclosure, matériel support, and swift decision-making.
A murkier area of analysis is trying to determine the motivations of the leaders. Vladimir Putin called the demise of the Soviet Union the greatest political tragedy of the 20th century. He also does not view Ukraine as a legitimate country and knows that many in Russia don’t, either. There may be a parallel to Xi Jinping’s thinking here: Reunification of Taiwan, a “sacred territory,” is, after all, a high priority for Xi. But what is less clear is whether this really is Xi’s highest priority. In the PRC, the actions of the party and the bureaucracy must hew to lines of propaganda that have become known as “Xi Jinping Thought.” The question is: What are Xi’s true thoughts about Taiwan?
One notable difference between these two authoritarian leaders is that Xi seems less motivated than Putin by personal enrichment and corruption. Xi is moved by his belief in the supremacy of Chinese-style socialism and by his conviction that he alone is responsible for putting China and its people at the center of global — or at least regional — affairs. He hopes to reach that goal by enforcing loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party within China.
Another likely distinction between the two is that Putin seems to believe that the actual use of military force is the best way to demonstrate his power and authority. Xi, by contrast, is steeped in centuries of Chinese philosophy and is more likely to believe that true power is the fruit of effective bluffing, deception, and the patience to weaken and gain influence over adversaries. This philosophy dictates that a leader remain disciplined, avoiding impulsive behavior and lying in wait until the moment is right to take action. Only the intemperate start a war when the desired objectives can be achieved without one.
But that brings us back to the question: What are Xi’s objectives? It does appear that they are more expansive than reclaiming control of Taiwan, as high a priority as that is. First and foremost, he wants to be the leader of a rejuvenated China as he defines it. Second, he wants to expand China’s presence in the world and create a universally admired China that can check the global influence of the U.S. and its liberal-democratic allies. Perhaps, for the time being, Taiwan may be a useful distraction — a way for Xi to fix the world’s attention on something other than these even-more-audacious objectives.
Before examining why Xi is likely seeking to avoid a war over Taiwan in favor of other goals, it’s important to account for the growing perception in some quarters — including in the ranks of U.S. military strategists and planners — that such a war is probable. The commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Phil Davidson, testified to the U.S. Senate last year that “the threat [China poses to Taiwan] is manifest during this decade, in fact in the next six years.” One school of thought holds that the PRC is eyeing the U.S. political calendar and that Xi will make his move on the island after affirming his hold on power at this fall’s 20th Communist Party congress, and before or during a U.S. presidential transition.
There are other reasons that many observers anticipate a move on Taiwan will happen sooner than they’d previously assumed. Xi will turn 70 in June 2023. He believes that it is his destiny to unite the Communist mainlanders with their renegade compatriots in Taiwan, and he may also believe that the world would do little to resist a Chinese attack on the island. Remember: In 1984, Deng Xiaoping promised the British that Hong Kong would remain autonomous for 50 years after Britain returned it to China. Xi broke that promise, and the rest of the world stood by and allowed him to do so. Who could blame him for thinking that the world would let him seize Taiwan, too?
Xi also sees that the U.S. is distracted by the Ukraine war, internal political polarization, inflation, and other challenges. He may believe that these distractions leave him an opening to speed up his plans for Taiwan.
Yet while the “sooner rather than later” school of thought about Xi’s intentions must be taken seriously, there are good reasons for skepticism. First, it would be a mistake to ignore or underestimate the several millennia of Chinese culture and philosophy that inform the modern Chinese state, including its military training and doctrine. Simply put, as has been written elsewhere — including in U.S. military journals — “deception is the Chinese way of war.” Given the weight of Chinese intellectual thought, it is unlikely that Xi and other Chinese leaders believe a direct armed confrontation with the United States and its allies over Taiwan is their best option.
It is certain that going forward, the PRC will maintain military pressure on Taiwan and continue to provoke its foreign adversaries. What’s less certain is that such actions will presage an imminent military confrontation. Xi knows that, despite the military buildup and economic advances China has managed in recent years, the U.S. remains a superior power in every way: militarily, economically, and diplomatically. The war in Ukraine has made that even more apparent. The United States alone has committed tens of billions of dollars of military and economic assistance to Ukraine and has led the world in excising the Russian economy from the global financial system without breaking much of a sweat. NATO is now also expanding and spending more on its own defenses.
Another reason why one should question whether Beijing really is ready to move on Taiwan is the precarious domestic situation Xi faces. His “zero Covid” policy has been a disaster on every front, which in turn has exacerbated underlying economic tensions. According to the PRC’s official statistics, economic growth is in the 4–5 percent range. Of course, the official statistics can’t be trusted, and in truth, the Chinese economy probably is contracting at the moment. Some years back, 8 percent growth was considered by Western economists as the minimum rate at which stable employment was ensured — and predictably, official PRC statistics never reported a growth rate below 8 percent. But that era is long over. The unemployment rate among urban, college-educated Chinese is nearing 20 percent. And the Chinese middle class — the cohort upon which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would need to depend if it hoped to sustain a protracted war with the U.S and its allies over Taiwan — is under increasing economic pressure of its own.
Also, consider what China’s urban, educated elites — the product of the now-abandoned “one-child policy” — have been trained to do. The Chinese primary- and secondary-education system is designed to prepare them for the gaokao, the national college-examination system. Tertiary education in China has often been criticized for its deficiencies. A 2018 analysis in the Berkeley Political Review noted the “reluctance among many foreign institutions to accept gaokao scores” given “the test’s emphasis on rote memorization and its serious disregard for critical thinking.” The products of such a system are hardly a solid base on which to build a military force for an extended campaign against Western democracies.
Of course, the PRC does have a vast rural population that it could draw from in the event of a war. But the country’s educational system does an even poorer job of serving rural Chinese than it does of serving the urban elite. Stanford economist Scott Rozelle and his colleagues have long documented the underinvestment in and declining capabilities of schools serving the rural poor in China. In a recent paper, Rozelle and his fellow scholars argued that “the education system in poor rural areas has been unable to produce high school graduates at a rate considered healthy at this point in China’s development path.” The paper found that more than half of Chinese middle-school students fail to advance to high school, either because they can’t pass admission tests or they do not pursue further schooling. A 2017 Science magazine piece noted some other startling findings of Rozelle’s research:
Surveys by Rozelle’s team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with the fast-paced official curriculum. A third or more of rural kids, he says, don’t complete junior high. Factoring in the 15% or so of urban kids who fall at the low end of IQ scores, Rozelle makes a stunning forecast: About 400 million future working-age Chinese, he says, “are in danger of becoming cognitively handicapped.”
Another consideration that is overlooked in the “war is coming” analysis is that the PRC’s economy is quite dependent on the health of Taiwan’s (successful, though much smaller) economy. Nearly 30 percent of Taiwan’s total exports go to the mainland, and even that figure understates the extent of the reverse dependency that exists: Close to 90 percent of those exports are the vital manufacturing components that help make the PRC one of the world’s biggest exporters of low-cost finished goods. By some estimates, China itself can produce about one-fifth of the semiconductors it needs to satisfy global demand for its electronics exports; much of the other four-fifths comes from Taiwan and South Korea. So a war with Taiwan — particularly because it would also, in all likelihood, become a war with South Korea — would cut off the primary driver of Beijing’s economic power.
These are realities about which Xi is well-informed. The zero-Covid policy reflects Xi’s more immediate desire for internal perfection and control. He will pursue this policy regardless of the obviously disastrous consequences. It is of a piece with the Xi Jinping Thought manifestos taught in Chinese schools, which emphasize Chinese socialism and the deified wisdom of the Party and Xi, its maximum leader. The PRC’s concentration camps in Xinjiang, its draconian online censorship, and its decision last year to crack down on “boy bands and effeminate men” in the Chinese entertainment industry are other examples of how the CCP is putting Xi Jinping Thought into action. Sustaining the momentum of these initiatives while maintaining domestic order through an extensive police state is time-consuming and expensive.
Thus, military provocations against Taiwan also may be part of a strategic deception campaign meant to mask these underlying Chinese economic and social fissures that are becoming more obvious to both the urban Chinese elites critical to Xi’s success and to foreign audiences. Keeping the focus on Taiwan helps distract attention from the great lengths to which Xi must now go to dominate and subdue the Chinese people.
Xi Jinping Thought also teaches that China’s success and virtuous example will earn it the admiration of the rest of the world. Hence the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi’s signature foreign-policy project. As originally envisioned in 2013, the BRI was to be a global network of infrastructure projects through which the PRC could project its influence abroad. China would fund infrastructure development in other countries, accumulating more and more influence until it could not be economically restrained by the U.S. or anyone else.
Despite the hype that’s still often attached to it, the BRI that Beijing originally envisioned is now dead. Since 2013, China’s declining economic fortunes and eroding goodwill have destroyed whatever chances it had of realizing this grand vision. Where heavy infrastructure projects have been undertaken, they’ve saddled local economies with excess debt, while providing little economic stimulus, transparency, or local workforce development in return; nearly all of their benefits have accrued to Beijing. Other countries have noticed this and become more reluctant to host BRI projects of their own. And as Beijing’s economic woes mount, it has had to abandon already-planned projects in, among other places, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia.
Still, despite these setbacks, China has caused and continues to cause considerable global mischief through the BRI program while the world’s attention is focused elsewhere. Consider recent reports of a PRC military facility in Cambodia. The military base is just the latest example of how largely unnoticed Cambodia has fallen prey to China’s influence, to the point that it is now almost a Chinese client state. Next door in Laos, the PRC has built a $6 billion high-speed rail from Kunming, China, to the Laotian capital of Vientiane. The debt Laos owes to China for this project is 40 percent of the Laotian GDP.
Beijing has managed to earn similar clout through BRI projects in Myanmar, Djibouti, Sri Lanka, and other neglected places, establishing a presence in the Gulf of Thailand, the Indian Ocean, and the Horn of Africa. Other projects abound, including mining operations in Central Asia and Africa. Even if these projects collectively fall short of the original vision of the BRI, they’ve allowed Beijing to seize territory through loan defaults, grab valuable mining facilities, and control waterways that put other countries at the PRC’s mercy. All while the world is distracted by the possibility of war across the Taiwan Strait.
Short of a direct confrontation with Taiwan, Xi will continue to look for ways to dominate vulnerable regions and countries and undermine his adversaries, including the U.S. He will not stop the illegal Chinese drug labs that export fentanyl through Mexico and across our borders. He will encourage the PLA and other actors to engage in influence operations, using social-media propaganda and cybercrimes to exploit and exacerbate America’s internal political divisions.
Xi’s single-minded belief in the righteousness of his own agenda makes him unlike any other Chinese leader since Mao. Going forward, we should expect to see that certitude play out in heavy-handed, ruthless efforts to put down dissent; deeper intrusions into the lives of every Chinese citizen by the regime’s surveillance state; and/or further marginalization of ethnic minorities through the intentional internal relocation of Han Chinese, as has been seen in Mongolia and elsewhere.
This is a long-term agenda, and it is by no means certain to succeed. What is certain is that war in the Taiwan Strait — barring a quick capitulation by Taiwan, the U.S., and its allies, which seems highly unlikely — would be catastrophic for Xi. Of course, the Biden administration and its allies in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and elsewhere are right to keep an eye on Xi’s Taiwan provocations; military support for Taiwan is appropriate and should continue and grow, whether or not the PRC has imminent designs on an invasion. The world looked the other way as Beijing abrogated its commitments to Hong Kong’s autonomy, and Xi was emboldened by the lack of pushback.
If Xi believes he can dominate the Chinese people and impose his Sino–Marxist vision on them while expanding the PRC’s global influence through empty threats of a war in Taiwan, he’ll do so. If at the same time Taiwan happens to fall under Beijing’s influence because of global indifference or lack of will, as Hong Kong did, so much the better. But taking Taiwan by force? A hot war he could lose? That seems too risky a bet for an orderly, disciplined leader like Xi to make.