A peaceful, prosperous and stable Taiwan is an existential threat to Xi Jinping’s China
As Taipei goes to the polls, the avaricious autocracy across the strait threatens global economic chaos
On Jan 13 2024, the people of Taiwan will elect a new president and legislature. This event has become a potential flashpoint in competition between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the West which already risks escalation from an economic contest into direct military engagement.
The driver of this escalation is Xi Jinping. He presents the assimilation of Taiwan into PRC territory as a historical inevitability, central to his personal goal of “rejuvenating” China, which he also describes as historically inevitable. This, he believes, can only happen under the sole authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Under Xi’s authoritarian control, the CCP has moved from a superficially benign foreign policy posture based on “win-win” solutions of global ills to an openly assertive revisionist agenda, including exaggerated territorial claims with major implications for global prosperity and security.
The serving president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, on the other hand, has stated that relations across the Taiwan Strait must be determined by democracy and the will of the Taiwanese people. This assertion directly challenges everything that Xi and the CCP most resolutely stand for, at a time when they have themselves chosen to challenge the Us-led liberal order. It also demonstrates why Taiwan is an existential threat to Xi and his party. The CCP has been the sole dictator of power in China since 1949, legitimising its rule in part by insisting there is no viable alternative. Taiwan’s success shows that this is simply false, and in doing so gives rise to a potential flashpoint.
The current trade war between China and the West, based on competition in the field of semiconductors, is in a sense already being fought over Taiwanese territory. In recent years, an ambiguous US policy of defending Taiwan’s democratic status quo has worn increasingly thin under the CCP’S concerted economic, political and military coercion.
As long as Taiwan formally claiming “independence” remains a red line for Beijing’s zero-sum policy, the sole meaningful guarantor of Taiwanese autonomy is Western military support, largely from the US. The aim of this aid has been to convince Beijing that the risks of invading Taiwan outweigh the benefits. The latest step – a $300m (£237m) sale of equipment – was approved less than a month ago.
US intelligence services reportedly believe that Xi intends the Chinese military to be “ready” to invade Taiwan by 2027. It is clear that Beijing at least intends to acquire the capabilities necessary for success. In military terms, China is matching its own risk-gain analysis to an assessment of the West’s. The West wants to deter China from invading Taiwan; can China reverse the tide of power and deter the US from defending it?
Under Xi, China has undergone massive military expansion and modernisation, notably in missile and nuclear capabilities. The CCP rules primarily by force and oppressive surveillance, as witnessed during the pandemic.
Despite talk of “glorious rejuvenation”, the CCP’S ultimate claim to “legitimacy” is as the military liberators of China’s people and guarantors of their external security.
In the case of Taiwan, this means having the intention and capability to regain “rightful” control of supposed sovereign territory, whatever the cost.
Willingness to subordinate the wellbeing of the Chinese economy and people to a dream of global military supremacy is a direct legacy of Marxism-leninism; a Communist economy is inherently subordinated to party power.
Mao was willing to destroy the Chinese economy twice over and sacrifice tens of millions of Chinese lives in the course of consolidating the Communist Party-state. Will Xi have the ruthless strength to follow Mao’s road to victory?
Given the opacity of decisionmaking processes in totalitarian autocracies, it is well-nigh impossible to judge what his cost-benefit balance amounts to. It’s equally hard to draw firm conclusions about party unity from the recent apparent military and government purge.
But there is a hollowness to Xi’s rhetoric over Taiwan that must be resonant at home as well as abroad. However CCP influence operations succeed in undermining the integrity of the Taiwanese elections, it is plain nonsense to tell Taiwanese citizens that they inevitably should “share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the
Chinese nation”. Even behind the Great Firewall of China, many know this is a sham. Levels of unemployment among the young are matched only by levels of disillusionment and despair about the future. The Taiwanese people – in particular, young people – do not want to exchange their freedom, peace, prosperity and stability for that. And Xi’s brutal putsch in Hong Kong is scarcely an appealing precedent.
Taiwan has never posed the slightest threat to PRC security. The biggest threat to security from the CCP perspective is disaffection among the domestic population spreading into the party elite. Among the largest sums Xi spends, other than on the military, are the billions he piles into grotesquely oppressive digital surveillance and social control.
And hence, against the odds, there may yet be checks to Xi’s futile ambition. The demise of a transactional social contract between the CCP and the PRC’S people has already revealed the weaknesses of “Xi Jinping Thought” and his party’s supposed entitlement to power.
Meanwhile, democratic Taiwan proves that Chinese people can thrive and prosper in freedom. That is the reason Xi seeks so obsessively to annihilate it, and why he must never be allowed to do so.