On the inauguration day of Taiwan’s eighth democratically elected president, Lai Ching Te, Chinese Communist dictator Xi Jinping menaced the island nation with military exercises, imitating a full-scale naval invasion. Having increased military expenditure 30-fold since 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims that Taiwan is a rebellious Chinese province, regularly threatening its 23.5 million citizens with annexation. Home to the exiled nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, the island of Taiwan enjoyed rapid growth in the latter half of the 20th century, transitioning from an agrarian society of peasants to an urbanised, industrialised economic powerhouse. Dubbed the ‘Taiwan Miracle’, this rapid transformation was marked by land reform, an increasingly liberalised market economy, and an export-focused trade strategy. In 2024, the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company holds a 50% market share in the manufacturer of semiconductor chips, essential components of many consumer products (e.g., personal computers, smart phones, refrigerators) and weapons systems.
This dynamic economy and manufacturing sector is not, however, what attracts Xi Jinping to the prospect of annexing Taiwan. The CCP would gladly render the island a heap of rubble to snuff out Taiwanese democracy. Neither is it simply the practical need, inherent in all closed, tyrannical systems of government, to destroy all potential political alternatives to dictatorial rule that appeals to Jinping. More fundamental is Jinping’s fervent desire for Chinese rejuvenation. Embodying wounded national pride, Jinping wants to remind the world of China’s unfathomable civilisational history, stretching 5000 years. Jinping and the CCP feel that The United States, a mere upstart by comparison, ought to be challenged as a global economic and military hegemon. Jinping, in a 2023 speech honouring Mao Zedong, asserted that China offers an alternative system of values – social, moral, and economic – to the West. For Jinping, a prosperous westernised democracy 130km from the Chinese coastline is an affront to Chinese pride.
Despite China’s enormous navy, unmatched numbers of military personnel, and modern weapons systems, a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan is sure to cost the aggressor hundreds of thousands of casualties. The United States, having maintained a position of strategic ambiguity as to whether it would commit forces to defend Taiwan, offers a deterrent to invasion. Given the respective nuclear arsenals of China and the United States, a Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan is a flashpoint for global annihilation. Even if it were to succeed in conquering Taiwan, China would be a global pariah and subject to innumerable sanctions. Jinping has witnessed Putin’s catastrophic invasion of Ukraine, and the willingness of the West to provide aid to a democratic nation under assault. Given these facts, must we really believe Xi Jinping when he says that China aims to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027? The answer is must unequivocally be yes.
Tyrants throughout history generally reveal their intentions plainly. Adolf Hitler, speaking before the Reichstag in 1939, told the world that he intended to end the Jewish race in Europe. Mein Kampf, Hitler’s rambling manifesto, articulated his Jew-hating worldview in 1925, yet it took the physical discovery of concentration camps in 1944 for the world to believe his Reichstag proclamation. As much true for Hitler as Stalin, tyrants who proclaim ideological belief often are telling the truth. Stalin and his Soviet regime were long assumed to be cynics using communist ideology as a front to wield untold power. When the Soviet archives became available to the world in the early 1990s, Western academics came to a disturbing realisation – Stalin was, in fact, a communist. The upper Soviet leadership used the same language in private as in public, extolling the virtues of Marxist-Leninist Communism. Stalin sent the wives of Vyacheslav Molotov and Mikhail Kalinin, senior members of the Soviet regime, to gulags, and yet both men stayed loyal to him, illustrating the fervour of their ideological commitment. As such, Jinping’s belief in a resurgent China, which offers a repressive alternative to Western institutions (‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’), ought to be considered sincere.
Some commentators and academics (e.g., Noam Chomsky and John Mearsheimer) blame Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on the West, claiming that the United States encouraged Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to the latter’s peril. These pundits suggest that Russia was left with little choice when faced with the possibility of a NATO country on its western border, which could be used as a springboard for hostile action on its soil. While plausible on its face, this rational explanation of Putin’s behaviour is belied by a 2021 essay that he authored entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, a 5000-word treatise questioning the legitimacy of Ukraine’s borders and arguing that Russians and Ukrainians share a common destiny. In early 2022, Putin claimed that Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks, and ought to be part of a Russian land empire. Nearly two decades earlier, Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, and continues to extoll the virtues of the USSR today. It is not, then, a concern for his borders that motivates Putin in Ukraine, but rather a revanchist desire to re-establish the Soviet land empire. Despite the many warnings just mentioned, and the publicised massing of forces on Ukraine’s border, the world still reeled in shock as Russian forces rolled towards Kyiv on the 24th of February 2022. Perhaps, then, we should start listening more carefully to what our adversaries are telling us.
China’s military build-up is not for show, and when Xi Jinping announces his intentions to conquer Taiwan, we must take him seriously and make preparations accordingly. The canonised founder of the CCP, Mao Zedong, once said that power “grows out the barrel of a gun” – as the Chinese military grows larger and more advanced each year, so grows the confidence of Jinping. The mind of the tyrant, impervious to argument, international law, moral pleading, or good faith negotiation, is motivated by the weakness of his adversary, perceived or actual, and is likewise deterred from action by strength. At this critical juncture, the West must flex its strength to provide a credible deterrent to China, as Taiwan will suffer the consequences of our perceived weakness.