THREAD: The #Taiwan Temptation
Why #China Might Resort to Force
A palpable shift in #Beijing’s thinking has been made possible by a decades-long military modernization effort, accelerated by Xi, aimed at allowing China to force Taiwan back into the fold.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
Why #China Might Resort to Force
A palpable shift in #Beijing’s thinking has been made possible by a decades-long military modernization effort, accelerated by Xi, aimed at allowing China to force Taiwan back into the fold.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
2/ Chinese leaders, including Xi, regularly extol the virtues of integration and cooperation with Taiwan, but the prospects for peaceful unification have been dwindling for years. Fewer and fewer Taiwanese see themselves as Chinese or desire to be a part of mainland China.
3/ The reelection of 'Tsai Ing-wen, reinforced Beijing’s fears that Taiwanese will never willingly come back to the motherland. The death knell for peaceful unification came in June 2020, when China exerted sweeping new powers over Hong Kong through a new national security law.
4/ Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” formula was supposed to provide an attractive template for peaceful unification, but Beijing’s crackdown there demonstrated clearly why the Taiwanese have been right to reject such an arrangement.
5/ Chinese leaders will continue to pay lip service to peaceful unification until the day war breaks out, but their actions suggest they have something else in mind. As tensions with the US have heated up, China has accelerated its military operations in the vicinity of Taiwan.
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