Next consider changes in the perceived benefits to Beijing of successfully liberating Taiwan. intervenes, and do so at an acceptable military cost.
Indeed, so dramatic has this shift been that Chinese President Xi Jinping and China’s top brass now believe that China can prevail militarily, even if the U.S. The result: a dramatic shift of the correlation of conventional forces in China’s favor. And no one doubts they could easily defeat Taiwan’s meager military. No one seriously doubts that these efforts have paid dividends or that China’s military is now capable – or very nearly capable – of conducting high-tempo, full-spectrum operations against U.S. forces access to the region and ultimately to launch amphibious operations against the island. These modernization efforts were aimed specifically at enabling the Chinese air force, navy, army and strategic rocket force to blockade Taiwan, deny U.S. It has spent the quarter-century since then modernizing its military so that it would never find itself in a similar situation again. Beijing did not like having to back down during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996 when the United States sent two carrier strike groups to Taiwan to deter Chinese aggression. Consider the changed conventional military balance. Now, none of these conditions remain in place. Given the United States’s overwhelming nuclear superiority during this era, and the credibility this lent to its implicit nuclear threat, this meant that the potential costs to Beijing of any cross-strait invasion were simply so high that no anticipated political benefit could justify the risk.įast forward to today. would be forced to use nuclear weapons to defend the island. As China became wealthier and more militarily capable, deterrence was upheld by the possibility that any attempt to use conventional military force to liberate Taiwan might escalate to the point where the U.S. But for the most part – and especially during the period of “peaceful rise” diplomacy initiated by Deng Xiaoping – this was a background aspiration rather than a pressing concern.įinally, cross-strait conventional deterrence was effectively backstopped by U.S. Toīe sure, the recovery of all the nation’s historical territory, including Taiwan, has been part of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) raison d’être since the founding of the People’s Republic. Second, for most of this period Beijing’s level of motivation was in any case relatively low. The combination of Chinese military weakness – the PLA was neither organized nor equipped for serious amphibious operations – and Taiwanese-American conventional military strength meant that Beijing was dissuaded from even attempting to use military force to compel Taiwan to return to the fold. support, Taiwan’s armed forces during this period were sufficiently strong to deny the PLA any realistic possibility of conducting a successful amphibious assault on Taiwan. Three factors were key to deterring China from attacking Taiwan. And for most of the period since Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces retreated to the island in 1949, the combined forces of Taiwan and the United States have done just that.
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