It won’t be easy.

The National Interest
Date: June 1, 2019
By: Mark Episkopos

The Taiwan question has long been in a thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) side. In the decades following the Shanghai communiqué, the CCP’s core strategic approach to Taiwan was to bide their time while building up national strength. As Deng Xiaoping famously proclaimed, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can wait 100 years to reunify with Taiwan (also known as Republic of China, or ROC) if necessary.

Today’s CCP appears to be operating within a much shorter time frame, however. With China’s rise to great power status, Beijing wields unprecedented economic leverage over Taiwan and is increasingly comfortable with flexing its military muscle overseas. XI Jingping is “losing patience” with the defiant island off his southeastern coast, which continues to rebuff Chinese reunification schemes premised on what Xi calls a “one country, two systems” approach.

It is unlikely that the CCP would seek an outright invasion and occupation of Taiwan, given the drastic geopolitical risks that would entail. But as East Asia scholars have frequently cautioned, the China-Taiwan relationship is fraught with potential escalatory spirals that can easily set the two sides on a path to unavoidable military conflict.
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