Why Russia's invasion does not decrease the risk to Taiwan
Beijing does not think like a Western country when it comes to reunification
Hello and welcome to Series 3 of What China Wants.
Apologies that it has been so long since I last posted, but as a professional China watcher it has been a rather busy time since Christmas. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, work is the curse of the writing classes.
In Series 3 I will be turning our attention to the growth of Chinese influence around the world. To do so I will look at a number of what we call “strands” of activity: economics, politics, defence, culture, science, technology, and so on. The aim is to map out China’s influence and examine whether or not it is growing worldwide - and if so, how.
But in today’s post I’m going to discuss China’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over the last two weeks or so there has been a lot of talk on what Putin’s operation means for the future of Taiwan. A general hypothesis, which I have heard Western generals spout on the radio and read commentators push in the papers, is that the Russian army’s travails make it less likely that Beijing will force the reunification with what it considers to be a renegade province.
Unfortunately, the view at our (political and geo-economic risk) firm Evenstar is that Russia’s actions don’t really change anything.
Our reasoning is straightforward. President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been so vocal about reunifying with Taiwan as part of the Chinese Dream, whether Taipei wants it or not, that it has become a totemic underpinning of their rule. The legitimacy of the country’s leadership now rests in strong part on bringing the island to heel.
With this primary point in mind, it is useful to explore some of the arguments being made in the West as to why Beijing will now be less likely to invade.
Russia’s recklessness has alienated China and put the relationship under threat. This is not the case, at least publicly. It was only a few weeks ago that Presidents Putin and Xi met at the Winter Olympic games and announced that their friendship had “no limits”. This is a situation that has not changed. Yesterday the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, told a reporter that the Russia-China relationship was one of the most important in the world, and that any attempt to split the countries apart would be doomed to failure. Russia, said Wang, was China’s “chief strategic partner”.
China has been put off by the international reaction to invading another country. This might be the case if Beijing considered Ukraine to be another country, but it doesn’t. “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory,” repeats the Foreign Ministry on a frequent basis. For Beijing, the situation with Taiwan is an unresolved internal matter stemming from the civil war, and so anything the CCP does to resolve it is not a concern of any other nation.
Then there is China’s central place in the global economy to consider, with the PRC responsible for 28% of global manufacturing and 18% of the trade in goods. Any sanctions made against it by the West would devastate international supply chains and do great damage to Western economies. Not only that, but over the last few years China has been building up its defences against US economic warfare.
In short, the West and its allies would not be able to punish China in anywhere near the same as they have gone after Russia without shooting themselves in both feet. Beijing knows this.
Ukraine’s fight back is making China worry about Taiwanese resistance to any reunification effort. This may be correct in military circles, but it is not likely to be an issue for Xi and his political allies, for several reasons.
First, Beijing has long considered it unlikely that Taiwanese soldiers would fight against fellow Han Chinese. Much like Putin thought that the Ukrainians would welcome his troops as liberators, many politicians in Beijing tell themselves that the Taiwanese would be happy to see reunification happen at last.
Second, the Taiwanese military is not that well trained and equipped. Anecdotal evidence suggests that recruits sometimes don’t see a weapon throughout their training, and even if they did, the tanks and planes they use are all old. Many date from the 1970s and 1980s, although the US is now helping them to upgrade. The repeated recent air incursions from the Chinese airforce into Taiwanese airspace have left the island’s airforce on its knees, with tired pilots and planes running out of spares: Beijing now knows the limits it can push the defenders too.
Third, China has a long history of accepting horrendous losses without complaint. As Chairman Mao said to the Soviet Union’s President Khrushchev in 1957, “We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out, conventional or nuclear, we will win… If the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass and we will get to work making more babies than ever before.” It might be argued that modern Chinese people are unwilling to sacrifice in the way the previous generations did, but they don’t have a political voice. If hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers are lost, is this a price worth paying for the CCP to stay in power? The calculation is likely to be yes, because an overthrow of the Communist Party would likely lead to far more bloodshed.
At the end of the day it is hard to see how President Xi and the CCP at large will be put off from achieving a key strategic goal – a goal that underpins their legitimacy – by Russia making a bloody fool of itself in Ukraine. In fact, the lessons they are drawing from the war seem to be “how do we do this better?”. The shock that many in the leadership feel is that Ukraine would dare to fight back: as the Chinese consul general in Osaka, Japan said last week, “the lesson of Ukraine is that the weak should not fight the strong".
So, we still believe that China will attempt to take Taiwan by force if it cannot convinced the island to acquiesce by diplomatic means. The question we need to ask instead is when. According to a senior advisor on international affairs to Beijing, the answer is sometime before 2027. More on this next week…
Finally, if you would like to read some more analysis on the relationship between Russia and China, here are some more of my posts:
How Russia & China are Ditching the Dollar