The US is trapped in Iran. Will China attack Taiwan now? (Part 1)
On why, how and when Beijing will resolve the Taiwan Question
[100% of this article is written with human hands.]
The situation in Iran has dominated the news headlines for the past few weeks. Naturally, even though China is a distant party to this conflict (as Hegseth himself confirmed), many people still try to link it to China.
First, there is the claim that China stands to hurt the most from this war. I dealt with this quite easily in this tweet.
And then there is the outcry about why China has done nothing to defend Iran, supposedly an ally of China (No, they are not allies.)
At the time of writing this piece, Trump even threatened to cancel the upcoming Xi-Trump meeting if China doesn’t offer help.
China, China, China! But isn’t this war mainly about Iran, Israel, and the US?
The most egregious narrative, however, belongs to the idea that China would exploit this opportunity to take action against Taiwan.
If this is true, the likelihood of that can only grow more intensely after Iran effectively closes the Hormuz, and after it becomes increasingly likely that the US would be mired in an endless war in the Middle East again.
When the US is shipping THAAD away from Asia and sending marines from Okinawa to the Persian Gulf, and when there are now substantive questions regarding whether the US military can actually protect its own allies and sustain a long war against even a second-rate power, what better timing than now to resolve the Taiwan Question once and for all?
And yet China is doing nothing, and we are kept waiting.
At this point, I should point out that the idea that “because the US is busy elsewhere, China will take the chance to attack Taiwan” reveals the true lack of understanding about the entire matter.
I have long wanted to lay out my view about the Taiwan Question comprehensively, so I figure perhaps this is the right moment, especially given what the US has just done against Iran, a sovereign state at the opposite end of the world, is stacked against what Beijing is NOT doing against an island it has always claimed to be its own, but never moves a finger yet.
And not just the question in the title. I will also use my own mental framework set up in this essay to answer questions, including:
Why is Beijing so angry about Takaichi’s comment about Taiwan?
Is the Davidson window real? In other words, is there really a 2027 deadline for a military invasion?
A tale of two mental frameworks
I will start with a review of Beijing’s official stance.
Beijing’s perspective on Taiwan has been quite consistent. It considers Taiwan to be a runaway province, a remnant of the last civil war, and a remaining relic of past humiliations. It has always treated the Taiwan Question as a domestic issue and set recognition of the so-called “One China Principle” as the prerequisite for commencing any diplomatic relationship.
Concurrently, Beijing has consistently and openly treated reunification as its ultimate strategic goal. Its exact formula to achieve that can be best summarized by this oft-cited statement:
我们争取和平统一，但是不承诺放弃使用武力
We strive for peaceful reunification, but we do not promise to give up use of force.
Here is what I find interesting about this statement: there are 3 key phrases: peace, reunification, and the use of force. But at some point, I realize that these 3 phraes carry entirely different weights to different people’s ears.
This is how a typical Chinese mind will rank the 3 by level of importance:
1) Reunification > 2) Peace > 3) Use of force
Now this is how a typical American mind will rank the 3:
3) Use of force > 1) Reunification > 2) Peace
You see, they are ordered entirely differently!
For a typical American mind, it assumes that sooner or later, China is going to use force against Taiwan. And not just Taiwan. It’s only Stage 1. After Taiwan, China will enter a stage of global military expansion. Peace? It’s the least important. Might well be a cover-up phrase for Beijing’s true intentions!
This is, at least, what Washington would do if it sees something as its strategic objective. If sending some missiles and drones to kill somebody can achieve some goal, fine, they will do it.
This is not what an average Chinese mind thinks, however. For the average Chinese mind, the thinking goes as something like this: the first and foremost issue is the reunification itself. But we really want to achieve it with minimal bloodshed. We prefer peace much, much more than war. Yet, we can’t give up on the use of force as our last resort. If we give up on the “stick”, our “carrots” alone will never achieve our top priority: the reunification itself.
These two entirely different modes of thinking are at the core of the misunderstandings about the Taiwan Question. My observation is that the US, overall, far underestimates China’s obsession with reunification, underestimates China’s willingness to reunify peacefully, and overestimates China’s preference for fighting wars, and not least because the US often tries to use its own mirror to understand China’s motives.
If you have completely followed me by now, I congratulate you. You don’t have to read the rest of this essay.
If you still find this to be unconvincing, though, now is the time for a deeper dive.
Why the obsession with reunification?
The first thing we need to know is that China is absolutely obsessed with making sure Taiwan is part of China. No matter whether you agree with China on this or not, this very obsession itself is a given. No amount of strategic calculation can ignore the existence of this obsession.
But why so obsessed?
There can be many reasons. I can imagine Beijing citing the history of past humiliations, memories of the old civil war, and shared language and heritage. You might also already be tired of the phrase “自古以来 from ancient times”.
But none of them are that relevant for you, the reader, the armchair geo-strategist ruminating on the future of the world.
There is, however, a single reason for the obsession: Taiwan is already at the core of the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China. Without it, China will crumble.
What is China, anyway? Like any country in the world, it’s a shared imagination. It’s a story that people keep telling each other, and all of these rounds of storytelling make a “country” a reality, and make people of the same country willing to live under the same roof and to follow the same rules.
For the US, this story is about the Mayflower, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, and the Statue of Liberty. Without those stories, the US has no reason to exist as a single body. Everyone might just pledge loyalty to Texas or California.
In contemporary China, the fundamental story is about the struggle to keep the country strong and prosperous, to protect its people from bullying by foreign powers and internal warlords, and to prevent disintegration into chaotic fragments once more.
“Not an inch of land lost” is the non-subtle promise the governing party has made to the governed since the founding of the PRC, the current iteration of China, as part of the same policy package aimed at keeping the country “real” and ensuring the governing party stays in power.
That “not an inch of land” is in relation to the map the Party has drawn for its citizens from the very beginning, and it’s true that so far it has made good this Great Promise. It has successfully and peacefully reclaimed Hong Kong and Macao and settled most of its border disputes with neighboring nations.
And now, Taiwan remains the last major obstacle to achieving this Great Promise.
What would happen if Taiwan were to become permanently and irrevocably independent, and Beijing did nothing about it? Beijing would have broken this Great Promise. And with that, it would lose the mandate to rule. Soon, its rule will collapse, and very soon the country will fall apart and descend into a new cycle of chaos.
This is as serious as it will get, because, once again, what’s more to a country other than the story it keeps telling itself? If you break that story, and make people realize it’s just a story, the people will question why they are in the same country after all. They will question whether everything is just a gigantic lie. They will question what they have signed up for in the very beginning. China, in its current form, won’t survive these questions and will only lead to significant human trauma before it settles into a new equilibrium in the indefinite future.
I guess you now arrive at the gist of this section: The Taiwan Question is not only about Taiwan itself. It is, fundamentally, also an issue about China. And it’s not just any single issue for China. It’s not a trivial piece of land that Beijing can just give up or be bargained away in exchange for something else. It’s an issue of life-and-death proportions. It’s about the survival of the Communist Party of China as well as the “China” in its current configuration.
This is why, when Xi got the opportunity to spell out China’s 4 red lines, the Taiwan Question sits at the very top of this top list. Xi is literally suggesting this is the most important issue for China, outranking anything else.
This is also why I often smile at the idea that the fate of Taiwan should be left to the choice of the 23 million people living on that island. For the record, I am a big fan of democratic choice, and I believe Taiwanese people should have a voice here. But I think, to be really fair, if we were to hold a referendum on it, we should also involve the 1.4 billion people living on the mainland. It’s not fair to exclude them from voting on an issue of life-and-death for themselves.
The cynics among you may argue: why only Taiwan? Why not Mongolia? Why not Vladivostok and hundreds of square kilometers of land lost to Russia just over a hundred years ago?
To be honest, I don't have an intellectually satisfying answer to these questions other than, “Well, they drew the map this way in the beginning. Now that the map is hardened into the national consciousness, they are only prepared to stake their political survival on this map”.
For the rest, they have already chosen to forget about them. They can be flexible when they have to, but where they can’t, they won’t.
I realize I can’t finish this essay in one go while writing about it. For Part 2, I will discuss why the willingness and the likelihood of a peaceful reunification have been severely underestimated, and why Beijing is not in a rush.
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