I’m not privy to the thinking of China’s leadership, but I’ve been observing them from a distance for a number of years. I’ve concluded two things: 1) a main motivator of China on the world stage is to make China the world’s greatest power, or at least a power second to none. (China came through its many generations of being exploited and humiliated by outside powers with its traditional sense of itself as the center of the world still intact); and 2) the Chinese leadership proceeds prudently, carefully, and with considerable strategic intelligence.
It is based on those two notions that I would wager that China, looking at the situation in the international scene today, will refrain from any attempt to extend its dominance over Taiwan by force.
My reasoning is simple: why upset the current course of things when things are going one’s way without one’s doing anything?
Things are going China’s way because the other two great powers in today’s world — Russia, still a great nuclear power, and the United States — are squandering their power and their standing as a consequence of the ill-considered wars each of them have blundered into.
Russia miscalculated that its invasion of Ukraine would be a walkover, and Putin’s unwillingness to acknowledge his failure has prolonged his blunder, with disastrous consequences to his military, his economy, and his nation’s standing in the world. Russia’s self-destruction has already considerably strengthened China’s hand in its relationship with Russia.
Now the United States is conducting an analogous immolation of American power and prestige with its reckless conduct in general (tariffs, belligerence toward long-time allies) but now specifically with its own disastrous war, and its own leader who seems unable to cut his losses by dealing with his defeat. The war has taken a heavy toll on American military capabilities, depleting important weapons supplies and damaging important bases, while an extraordinary series of firings and departures has hollowed out its experienced military leadership. America’s valuable allies in the Persian Gulf region have lost trust in the United States. And the surge in the cost of fuel is damaging the American economy.
So if one is China, one looks around at the competition and says: Power is always a relative thing, and if our two rivals are falling, in relative terms we are rising. Why change the situation when we’re winning by standing on the sidelines, picking up the pieces of the Russian and American breakdowns?
And in particular, when the “play” in question would be launching a war to bring Taiwan under Chinese control, the Chinese might reasonably contemplate — in view of Russia’s fate with Ukraine, and how things have gone for the U.S. in its war-of-choice against Iran — the possibility that THEIR war against Taiwan might likewise go badly. Drones have changed some of the calculus regarding small powers resisting great powers. And there are other powers that might or might not come into the conflict against China.
China asserts its claims on Taiwan for both symbolic and strategic reasons. But there is nothing urgent about those claims.
So if China’s leaders are as prudent and strategic as I believe them to be, they’ll do nothing to upset the current direction of movement among the great powers. Russia and the United States are already magnifying China’s stature by so energetically destroying their own.
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Power matters.