Why won't China invade Taiwan?
I don’t believe that the CPC is waiting for anything specific.There are two pseudo-deadlines that it is up against:2049 - the centennial of the PRC2027 or 2032 - end dates for Xi’s 3rd and 4th termsIn 2013[1] and 2019[2] , Xi was adamant in his state goal to not allow the Taiwan issue to linger to “future generations” by which he meant that he wanted to settle it during his time in office.
This suggested 2027 or 2032 as the deadlines.
However, since the Pandemic and the Ukraine War, he hasn’t made such statements. He’s not even talked about Taiwan in a dedicated speech in over 3 years. This leads me to suspect that he is giving up the venture and passing it onto “future generations”. Even during the Pelosi visit, Xi never made any strong statement on the issue. The only ones putting out threats were the Foreign Ministry spokespeople.During his famous National Day speech in 2021, he dedicated a whole paragraph to Taiwan, but unlike in 2013 and 2019, he made no statement on timing:
Xi has fallen back to the age-old Chinese copium of “time on our side”. This is the theory is that as the PLA dominates the Taiwan Strait more and more over the coming decades, Taiwan will be forced to concede without a fight. This… might be true. But what is certainly true is that Taiwanese youth no longer consider themselves even ethnically Chinese. So occupying Taiwan in 2050 is going to be far more difficult than in 2025.
Xi seems to be focusing on domestic matters at a time when the world is in turmoil and opportunities for China are abundant. Chaos is a ladder after all, but not one that Xi seems interested in climbing.
This expectation of surrender from the Taiwanese is laughably naïve. People rarely surrender without a fight, even when the odds are manifestly insurmountable. Poland didn’t surrender until the entire country was lost. The Norwegians fought tooth and nail before surrendering, the Finns did the same, so did the Yugoslavians, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Greeks, the Ethiopians, the Vietnamese, the Taliban, and finally the Ukrainians. The lesson of history is clear: people don’t know when they’re beaten. And even if they do, they will keep fighting.
In 1940 the Danes, the descendants of the Vikings, surrendered to the Germans in 6 hours. This was the logical thing to do in the face of an unwinnable war. But the Danes were the only ones who made the logical decision not to fight the Germans. The other small nations of Europe insisted on fighting even knowing they had no chance for victory. Fighting a hopeless resistance is part of human nature. The CPC expects Taiwan to take the Danish way
This fear of war is our greatest weakness, and it’s why China is surrounded by American client states today, states we had millennia to conquer and render into our clients and vassals, but never did. We wouldn’t have 38,000 American soldiers on our doorstep in South Korea if the Tang had finished their conquest of the peninsula 1300 years ago.—
