CHINA WATCH‘Beijing’s Plan to Crush Taiwan Under the “Wheels of History”’
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideological commitment to the unification of Taiwan is presented as the ultimate demonstration of China’s development under the CCP leadership, what party chairman Xi Jinping calls the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.
Originally published 26 September 2022.
The smoke has cleared from China’s military exercises in the Taiwan Strait last month, and the sequence of events highlights some of the realities of the regional security outlook.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on 2 August and from 4 to 7 August, the People’s Liberation Army conducted large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, including missile launches. Following the first round of exercises, further drills were conducted from 8 to 15 August. During that time, on 10 August, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council released a new white paper, titled The Taiwan question and China’s reunification in the new era. Chinese diplomats immediately began promoting its message around the world, including in Australia.
It is Beijing’s third white paper on the Taiwan issue, after those in 1993 and 2000, and has been in preparation for years. The timing of its release gives visibility to the mechanics of Beijing’s actions towards Taiwan in which an ideologically driven policy process is leveraged by tactical opportunism. While its release would have been anticipated in the lead-up to the Chinese Communist Party’s national congress in October, the specific timing shows how Beijing sought to link policy and military escalation directed at Taiwan to the actions of the US.
There’s a debate about whether the US should have created that tactical opening, but the developments do highlight Beijing’s underlying escalation pathway towards Taiwan. The August exercises in the Taiwan Strait crossed the so-called median line that had represented a nominal commitment to a cross-strait equilibrium. However, since their formal end in mid-August, the PLA Air Force has continued to conduct flights across the line. It is building on the military activity of the past several years and Pelosi’s visit gave an opportunity to step up the PLA presence across the Taiwan Strait and shift the status quo.
This accords with the CCP’s ideological commitment to the unification of Taiwan as the ultimate demonstration of China’s development under its leadership, what party chairman Xi Jinping calls the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. In the party’s ideological system, which it has described with a distinctive Marxist scientism as the ‘tide of history’, China is always moving forward to this goal. Beijing’s calibrated military escalation serves to validate this ideological belief and the party’s legitimacy.
