CHAPTER 3
The Taiwan Dilemma
SO WHAT MADE ME SO CONVINCED IN DECEMBER OF 2021 THAT Russia was going to invade Ukraine before the end of winter of 2022, months before they actually did it and with many respectable foreign policy pundits at the time predicting the exact opposite? And, more relevant for today, what does Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine say about why Xi Jinping is likely to attempt to invade Taiwan in the coming years?
For me, it started with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s background as a comedian. Many years before he entered politics, Zelensky had spent an early part of his career participating in comedy shows on Russian television—shows like the iconic KVN (Club of the Funny and Inventive), a marquee comedy program that has been one of the most popular shows of Russian and Soviet television since the early 1960s. It’s sort of a mix of Saturday Night Live and the comedy improv Whose Line Is It Anyway?, with teams of college-age youth competing before judges with skits often themed to current events and politics. KVN was an institution in Russia, one of the few programs that had showcased non–party approved humor on Soviet television—or at least until it ran afoul of censors in the 1970s and been banned until Gorbachev’s perestroika brought it back in 1986. The TV format spawned franchises and local competitions all over the country—and later, even, the world, as émigrés from the former Soviet Union in places like the United States, Israel, and Australia formed their own amateur teams. Many universities created their own KVN teams and competitions; my mother and her cousin had participated in one during their college years, and I had captained an amateur KVN team in my middle school class in Russia. Putin even attended a number of recordings of the show in person, one of which featured a team captained by a young man called Vladimir Zelensky, who would later go by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky had helped lead several highly accomplished Ukrainian teams in the late 1990s, and when he was elected as president of Ukraine in 2019, I immediately recognized that Moscow was likely intrigued by the prospect his presidency had created. He was a familiar face, steeped in Russian culture, and a native Russian speaker who at least back then had struggled to speak Ukrainian well. He was elected on a platform of ending the war in the Donbas that had been raging since 2014 and making peace with Russia. There were a lot of signs initially that he likely seemed a man that Putin could do business with. But by 2021 the indicators coming out of Moscow made it quite clear that Putin had run out of patience that Zelensky would do his bidding. As Zelensky’s term unfolded, he faced a fractured political landscape, one riven by an eight-year war against Russian proxies and intelligence services in the Donbas that had cost thousands of Ukrainian lives. There was no peace to be had with Putin, only capitulation, and, in fact, Zelensky pushed steadily in what the Kremlin saw as an anti-Moscow direction.
Just before Zelensky’s inauguration in May 2019, the Ukrainian Rada—its parliament—had passed a law giving priority to Ukrainian language in the public sphere, making it the language of choice across government services, media, and education. The law caused an outcry from Russian officials, who claimed to be standing up for the interest of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. Moreover, Moscow waited in vain for Zelensky to implement the so-called Minsk Agreements that had been pushed on his predecessor by Putin and the big European powers in the fall and winter of 2014–2015. The agreements required Ukraine to grant local self-governance to the breakaway Donbas provinces in exchange for a ceasefire, and—not surprisingly—they proved very unpopular in Ukraine, where they were judged (correctly) as a wily Russian attempt to further weaken and divide their country. And while Putin himself broke the agreement—it required him to withdraw his armed mercenaries from occupied Ukraine, something he had no intention of doing—to him, it was a lesson that diplomats and diplomacy weren’t going to solve his Ukraine dilemma.
But perhaps Zelensky’s most “egregious” act in Putin’s mind was when the Ukrainian government went after Viktor Medvedchuk, a leader of the pro-Russian party in Ukraine and Putin’s man in Kyiv. In the 1970s Medvedchuk was a defense lawyer who was appointed to defend several Ukrainian dissidents being prosecuted by the state for “anti-Soviet” activities and who, according to contemporaries, instead did everything possible to ensure their conviction. He turned politician in the 1990s and simultaneously—as is not uncommon in the post-Soviet landscape—became a very rich man, owning an over three-hundred-foot megayacht (with a twelve-meter-long swimming pool), a Gulfstream jet, a Bell helicopter, and even a replica of a Pullman dining train car that he had given his wife for her birthday. In 2003 he started to actively court a close relationship with Vladimir Putin, convincing him to even become a godfather to his daughter a year later. Putin allegedly came to believe that no question involving Ukraine could be solved without Medvedchuk, so when the Ukrainian government initially sanctioned Medvedchuk in February 2021 and put him under house arrest in May of that year, Putin likely lost faith that Zelensky could ever be a partner in his attempt to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence.
But it wasn’t just Zelensky.
I’ve spent much of my adult life now as a careful observer of Vladimir Putin, and I feel like I know him—or at least I know people like him—from growing up in Russia. By 2021 I had watched Putin’s rise warily for almost a quarter century. As his profile on the world stage grew and he consolidated power and turned the clock back on freedom and democracy in Russia, I instinctively felt like I understood his mindset and understood his toxic imperialist appeal to the Russian people—though I of course found it repugnant. He was much older than I was, but we had both lived through the same wrenching dissolution of the Soviet Union, and growing up in Moscow, I’d known kids just like him: dvor bullies.
Life in the Soviet Union changed very little from World War II through the end of Cold War I; the technological marvels and rapid expansion of the middle class that the United States experienced during the same time period was tempered inside the Iron Curtain. In Putin’s generation and mine, many Muscovites lived in blocky Soviet high-rise apartment buildings, built together in squares that enclosed a courtyard known as a dvor. The dvors were the neighborhood gathering place, where kids would play unsupervised for hours—all day, sometimes, on weekends. Every neighborhood dvor had a bully, one tough kid who tried to rule by fear and intimidation.
That is Putin. He has spoken over the years about how growing up in the Soviet Union toughened him, and that experience led him to view the geopolitical map as a dvor. He believes being a bully solves everything—that playground cunning, always trying to find an advantage, trying to stab someone in the back while they’re not looking will always achieve his desired outcomes.
As a leader, he tapped into something very elemental about the Russian psyche: grievance, victimhood, and imperialism. It is a common view among Russians that Russia had been a great empire whose greatness was stolen by the West.
I was eleven, living in Moscow, when the Soviet Union dissolved. As a kid it was hard to fully grasp the implications and the causes of your country disappearing. The system I had grown up in was falling apart, and it wasn’t clear what was going to emerge.
What many in the West missed at the time is that many Russian citizens had mixed feelings about the regime’s end and the fall of communism; certainly there was happiness about the collapse of a repressive, authoritarian regime and, especially, the dissolving of the fearsome and loathed security services—although, as we would later learn, the KGB would emerge in a new form with a new name all too soon. People celebrated the fantastic economic revolution that allowed Western goods like blue jeans and Coca-Cola and all the other trappings of the American middle-class life to arrive in Russian stores. But at the same time, there was an acute, gnawing feeling that the greatness of their country disappeared overnight. Great Britain, the empire upon which the sun never set, had faded over decades, giving the British people plenty of time to adjust to the new world landscape; the Soviet Union’s greatness disappeared seemingly in weeks.
Psychologically, the empire’s dissolution packed a lot of punch because the propaganda that Russian citizens had all experienced in school and on television during the Soviet era was very powerful. They were one of the world’s two superpowers—the first country to send a satellite into space, the first to launch a man into orbit around the planet. The Russians had been told for so long that they were great and that their country and vision for the future would be triumphant that it unmoored them when, in fact, the empire crumbled like a house of cards.
The transition to economic and political liberalism was hardly smooth. Many Russians had the sense that the United States, the West, and their Wall Street and Fleet Street bankers had plundered Russia’s economy, dancing on the grave of the Soviet Union as ordinary Russians saw their life savings and retirements evaporate amid rampant inflation and astounding corruption. (Often enough, it was Russians themselves who did the plundering and ended up becoming unimaginably rich oligarchs.) The transition devastated lives as much as psyches.
In August 1991, I lived through the country’s first putsch, as former Soviet hardliners tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, holding him incommunicado at his vacation house in Crimea, and reformist leader and newly elected Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin rallied Muscovites to defend the House of Soviets (often called the Russian White House), housing Russia’s lawmakers. I’ll forever associate that attempted coup with Swan Lake; the music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet ran on a loop on state television in the hours of the coup, an ominous sign for all of us watching because the music had become the marker the Soviet Union used when leadership changed. In 1982 the ballet had aired on TV as government leaders debated who would lead the country after the death of Premier Leonid Brezhnev; it was a stalling tactic, meant to give messy succession discussions time to play out. The same public ritual had occurred when Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, had died in 1984, and then when his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, died in 1985. Now the chords of Tchaikovsky’s music seemed to portend an end to Gorbachev.
My parents and I went down to see the demonstrations at the center of the city; there were already huge crowds surrounding the Russian White House where the opposition politicians were holed up—and tanks in the streets on the way to crush the resistance. The atmosphere was both tense and jubilant. Everyone felt that they were witnessing history in the making, but no one yet knew how this chapter would end. Boris Yeltsin, the new president of the Russian republic—which was still within the framework of the Soviet Union at the time—climbed atop one of the tanks (an image captured in one of history’s most remarkable photos) and gave a defiant speech that contributed to the hardliners losing their nerve and ultimately giving up.
Two years later, in 1993, it was Yeltsin who used tanks to attack that same Russian White House, the seat of Russian parliament that by then was full of nationalist and reactionist politicians opposed to his policies. He then violated the constitution by dissolving parliament, leading to the deadliest outbreak of street violence in Moscow since the October Revolution. The West, determined to support the democratic reformer Yeltsin at all costs, looked the other way. Russia’s slide toward authoritarianism and illiberalism can, unfortunately, be traced directly to that moment. The unconstitutional use of force against opposing politicians was ignored by most Russian democratic liberals and the West alike, sacrificed on the altar of expediency to avoid a return to power of communists and nationalists. But it was only a matter of time before at least the latter group was elected to power anyway.
What looked to the West like the miraculous march of freedom after the fall of the Iron Curtain didn’t feel like a miracle to most Russians. For many people, the collapse made life in the 1990s much worse on a daily basis. Sure, there were Western clothes and new luxuries in the stores, but most people couldn’t afford any of it. And there was an explosion of street crime. The Soviet Union had been relatively safe, in terms of crime—the draconian punishments and official monopoly on corruption of authoritarian regimes often lead to minimal petty crime. But as the country collapsed, the doors to the prisons were opened and political prisoners and hardened criminals alike (one of them being a then-unknown Evgeny Prigozhin, the future leader of the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency) flooded back into society, creating an opening for the rise of powerful transnational organized crime groups. One thing I remember so vividly about those early ’90s is the crime; life immediately felt very unsafe, with shootings in the streets, drugs, and organized crime exploding overnight. The law enforcement institutions, under their own pressure amid the government’s fall, not only couldn’t keep up but all too often became co-opted by the mafia.
When Putin came to power in 1999 and talked about rebuilding Russia, I understood viscerally the appeal of his message, even though I of course abhorred it. While I was living in the United States by then, I still talked to my grandparents back in Moscow, who, like many others, unfortunately voted for him. Most people in the West bought into the miracle of democracy and did not appreciate the disaster that the ’90s bore for many Russians, as a small group of oligarchs grabbed all the wealth and the benefits of the economic liberalization while most of the country faced not an abundance of freedom but poverty. Putin tapped into this reality, telling the electorate, “I’m going to improve your lives and security and restore Russia’s greatness.” And in his first years in power, the rise of oil prices following 9/11 meant that life actually did get better for many Russians; the country’s dependence on fossil fuels meant that the high energy prices translated into dramatically improved standards of living in Russia. Plus, Putin cracked down on visible street crime, making it clear early on that the only crime and corruption would be that sanctioned by his state. He also started to rebuild the Russian military and Russian power on the world stage.
In the 2000s I could see the grievance in Putin’s statements and in the presentations he and his minions gave regularly in settings like the Munich Security Conference, the annual confab of presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defense ministers, various elected officials, and geopolitical experts: We’re here to make Russia great again (even if that exact slogan had not yet appeared on the geopolitical landscape). We’re here to rebuild the empire that was stolen from us. The West backstabbed us, taking advantage of the weak leadership of Gorbachev, who let himself get snookered and allowed the West to break the country apart.
Year by year, I had watched Putin warily, and even though I certainly never sympathized with him in any way, shape, or form, I absolutely understood how so much of the Russian people’s support for him was genuine (and I think some parts of it remain genuine to this day). He was delivering on his promises to restore Russian power and greatness—to force the world and its neighbors if not to respect Russia, then to at least fear it. It was grotesque imperialism, but it worked.
By the end of the second decade of the millennium, I noticed a new dimension to Putin’s rhetoric. By 2021 it was evident that we were witnessing an aging authoritarian leader who was determined to “fix” what he viewed as an unsolved problem: Ukraine, a country that he long believed didn’t deserve to exist on its own, a space that by history and destiny he thought was meant to be part of Russia, a territory that was slipping away from his sphere of influence.
At the same time, it was quite clear to me that Putin—about to turn seventy and likely very mindful of his own longevity—was obsessed with his own place in history. He had long spoken admiringly about Peter the Great, the Russian tsar who came to power just two generations after a long lawless and anarchic period known as the Time of Troubles, when Russia had lost a third of its population and been occupied by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Peter had restored Russian military strength, created a navy, modernized the country, expanded its territories through conquest, and established an empire that became one of Europe’s Great Powers with his newly built city of St. Petersburg as its capital. It’s not hard to see how Putin, who was born in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, who also came to power after the unstable and chaotic period of the 1990s and had worked to rebuild the Russian military and expand its influence—and now its territory—would see himself as a worthy successor of Peter.i Putin clearly imagined himself restoring the old Russian empire—an empire that would be built on nationalism and patriotism, unlike the Soviet Union, which had been assembled on the quicksand of communist ideology.
The mortality clock, too, was no doubt weighing heavily on Putin’s mind, particularly after his two-year period of self-imposed isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, he mostly refused to see anyone who had not undergone PCR testing and a two-week isolation, and where his public meetings involved theatrics like huge spaces and comically long tables, which were so absurd that they became internet memes.
Put it all together and Putin’s sense of urgency of getting Ukraine—that prize territory of the tsarist Russian empire, Russia’s breadbasket, and a critical buffer state along the march of previous European invaders—back into Russia’s orbit was acute.ii Having given up on Zelensky and lost his puppet Medvedchuk to the wheels of Ukrainian justice, if Putin wanted to get Ukraine back, he would have to rely only on himself and what he—as it turned out mistakenly—thought was the might of the rejuvenated Russian military.
Putin’s obsession since coming to power was to Make Russia Great Again, even if he didn’t resort to that explicit slogan or to marketing it on hats. He early on consolidated his power over domestic Russian territory, brutally suppressing the insurgency in Chechnya and bringing it back into the fold of the Russian Federation, as well as doing away with elections of regional governors (choosing instead to appoint them directly from a cadre of loyalists).
Across the 2000s Putin invested in huge military modernization programs, taking advantage of high oil and gas prices—which finance a large part of Russia’s budget—and creating new weapons platforms like the T-14 Armata fourth generation tank, Su-57 fifth generation stealth fighter, and air-launched Kinzhal ballistic missile (which the Russians market as “hypersonic” even though it has not demonstrated ability to significantly maneuver at greater than Mach 5 speeds—the common definition of a hypersonic weapon). He also attempted to move away from the military’s long-term reliance on low-quality draftees and convert it instead into a professional contractor force.
That newly equipped and better-trained force, in turn, became part of Putin’s efforts to interfere in the affairs of other independent states, from the takeover of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine to saving dictator Bashar al-Assad from defeat by Sunni and Kurdish insurgents during the Syrian civil war. He involved Russian paramilitary forces in conflicts in Libya and parts of Central and Eastern Africa, helping out friendly dictators in order to spread Russian geopolitical influence (and grab some of their natural resources), and worked to raise the country’s prestige abroad by bringing the Olympics, World Cup, and Formula 1 to the Russian Federation.
Throughout, Putin’s goal above all else has been for the United States—the world’s only superpower—to treat him and his country with the respect he believes he and Russia deserve, welcoming them as equals, just as FDR treated Stalin during World War II. A major part of achieving that goal has involved reestablishing a “sphere of influence” where neighboring countries would be heavily influenced, if not fully dominated, by the Kremlin.
Except for the three Baltic states that cast their lot with the EU and NATO, most of the other former Soviet republics—the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as Armenia, at least prior to Russia abandoning it in its recent resumptions of territorial conflicts with Azerbaijan—have largely aligned with Moscow. Furthermore, by 2021 Putin’s policies had led to the effective reabsorption of the third biggest former Soviet state, Belarus, into Russia’s sphere of influence. (Belarus is led by a fellow authoritarian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who had agreed in 1997 to enter into a federal Union State with Russia but for decades stalled implementing the agreement until 2020, when Putin assisted him in suppressing democratic protesters following a rigged election and thereby dramatically reduced Lukashenko’s room for independent maneuver.) Thanks to multiyear military and intelligence interference efforts in Georgia following Putin’s short military campaign against the country in 2008, Russia has been able to get the Georgian government to exercise more of a pro-Russian line as well. Azerbaijan also keeps relatively warm relations with Moscow, while Moldova continues to be divided with Russia supporting its breakaway province of Transnistria.
All of these investments, escapades, and promising geopolitics, though, only got Putin so far. In his view, the restoration of Russian global influence could not be accomplished without Ukraine, which had been the second-biggest republic after Russia in the Soviet Union, being brought back under his control—if not outright rule. All in all, aside from the forever-lost Baltic states, it was Ukraine that kept Putin up at night as “the one, the most important one at that, that was trying to get away.”
Indeed, by 2021 Putin specifically felt that Ukraine was slipping further and further from his grasp, in no small part because of his own previous actions.iii Culturally and politically, the country was aligning west, toward Europe. It had been steadily investing in its military—its spending had nearly tripled since 2014—and increasing numbers of US and other NATO military trainers were helping to build up and reform the Ukrainian military, which was in the meantime increasing stockpiles of modern Western weaponry, such as the Javelin antitank missiles first provided by the United States in 2018. Ukraine also had a robust military-industrial complex, as it had retained many Soviet-era factories. (Notably, by the time of the invasion, Ukraine had managed to produce small quantities of Neptune anti-ship missiles, which it later used to sink the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, and was getting close to fielding short-range Hrim-2 ballistic missiles.) These developments made Putin realize that the longer he waited to invade, the harder the task would be, further amplifying his decision to go sooner rather than later.
Putin, buoyed by his military’s performance in Syria, was also highly confident in its abilities and the investments he’d made since coming to office to modernize the fighting force. President Obama had derisively predicted Syria would be a quagmire for Russia, but with a relatively light level of involvement of his air and naval assets, augmented by the paramilitary Wagner Group and special forces on the ground, Putin was able not only to hold back the rebels but to reverse dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fortunes and restore most of the country back to his control. Putin also believed the lightning-quick operation by Russian military intelligence Spetsnaz forces to take over Crimea in 2014, amid little Ukrainian resistance, showed that Ukraine would be no match for his forces.
At the same time, the Russian president was convinced that the Western backlash against Russia for this latest aggression would be minimal, just like it had been for the takeover of Crimea or the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Sure, there might be pro forma sanctions, but Putin had spent years de-dollarizing the Russian economy and believed it was now resilient against sanctions because of his orders to implement “import substitution” of critical goods. The Russian government had even created an indigenous payment network (SPFS) to serve as an alternative to international bank messaging system SWIFT and another (Mir) to replace the Visa and Mastercard credit card networks.iv Putin also doubted that Europe, hobbled by its reliance on Russian gas, had the stomach to enact the most severe sanctions. (In 2021 Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, imported over 55 percent of its gas and a third of its oil from Russia.) Putin simply could not imagine that Germany and other European countries dependent on Russian energy would be able to decouple from these fossil fuels so rapidly. To be fair, Putin was not making a bad bet. As I found out while attending the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022, mere days before the invasion, many European political and business leaders in attendance were not only convinced that Putin would not invade but could not contemplate getting off Russia’s fossil fuel needle for years to come. Ironically, the shock of their disbelief being proved wrong by the invasion itself likely played a huge role in shaking up the European community and convincing it to lean in aggressively and to rapidly reduce the continent’s energy dependence on Russia.
By 2021 Putin was not only all-powerful politically at home but also stunningly isolated. Years into his ever-tightening grip on the Kremlin, he had no one left among his government advisers capable of challenging the above-described assumptions and convincing him that the invasion could turn out a blunder of enormous proportions. His self-imposed COVID isolation meant he saw very few people in person and had largely surrounded himself with loyalist yes-men who would not dream of challenging him: most of them were even more nationalist and hawkish than he was, constantly egging him on. Even if someone did offer a contradictory opinion, he would confidently dismiss it, believing he knew better. One of the stories I heard from a well-placed source in Russia was that when Putin was considering seizing Crimea in 2014, he had some of his economic team come to him with concerns about the impact that Western sanctions would have on the Russian economy. Putin dismissed them with a telling line: “My job is to reunite Crimea back with Russia. Your job is to make sure we don’t suffer any serious consequences for it. I’ll do my job. You do yours.”
Exchanges like this underscore that Putin is a confident—and hereto largely successful—gambler. In the days following the Ukraine invasion, I found it astonishing to see how many foreign policy experts in DC, stunned that they had been wrong about whether Putin would invade, expressed their profound shock by explaining, “He has changed.” No. The truth is he has always been this person. One of his very first acts as Russian prime minister in 1999 was to launch the Second Chechen War, a war of choice that began only three years after the first one ended in such a humiliating disaster that it seriously endangered Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 1996. It was an enormous gamble that he could win a war that Yeltsin previously lost and not lose popular support—and yet he did. Next, he gambled that he could punish Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008 with a war without suffering any major consequences for it—and he pulled that off as well, with no one even bothering at the time to kick Russia out of the prestigious G-8 club of leading Western nations. The Crimean and Donbas adventures in 2014, not to mention the intervention in Syria, were also great gambles that proved highly successful—with very limited downsides for Putin personally. Finally, his regime’s cyber-led interference in the US presidential elections in 2016 had made him look all powerful on the world stage. Each of these acts entailed major risks that could have backfired badly, but he had always lucked out.
Putin’s whole life story, in fact, has been one of enormous luck. He was at the right place and the right time when the Soviet Union fell apart and his employer the KGB was in disarray, a disarray that allowed him to be picked up as a mentee by the powerful mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak and eventually rise to the influential post of deputy mayor of Russia’s second-largest city. Then, after Sobchak lost his reelection campaign, Putin used his St. Petersburg connections to get a job as deputy head of presidential administration in Moscow, a post that later led to an appointment heading the FSB intelligence service in 1998, becoming prime minister in 1999, and, finally, being anointed as Yeltsin’s successor at the turn of the millennium. It’s hard to think of anyone else being luckier in their meteoric career progression to become leader of Russia in the last hundred years. It must have given him great confidence that he was born under a lucky star and his gambles would always work out.
But the Ukraine invasion, as we now know, was the gamble—his biggest yet—that looks to have broken the streak.
I mention all of this not only because it helps explain the unexplainable—why Putin took such a huge seemingly unnecessary gamble, one that has come at incredible cost to his country in blood and treasure—but because in this case, I believe that what’s past is prologue.
As Putin did with Ukraine, Xi seeks to do with Taiwan.
WHY CHINA IS LIKELY TO INVADE TAIWAN
When I look at the situation in China, I unfortunately see very similar dynamics playing out there: an authoritarian leader, Xi, with few internal checks on his power, who—like Putin—has recently turned seventy and faces a ticking actuarial and political clock and who—like Putin—has also publicly proclaimed that the Taiwan problem cannot be pushed onto future generations, clearly implying that he is intent on “solving” it in his lifetime. I see a leader who—like Putin—has continued a decades-long upgrade to his nation’s military, views the target of his desire as an illegitimately independent territory, and sees it slipping culturally and politically further away from Beijing.
The parallels are strong and all worrisome, perhaps none more so than the fact that China likely sees a window closing on Taiwan unification. Not unlike Ukraine in the case of Russia, Taiwan is also slipping further away from Beijing’s grasp. Over the last seventy-five years, the Taiwanese have built their own independent identity and most consider their island an independent country, even if it hasn’t formally proclaimed independence. In fact, Taiwan in recent decades had even successfully made one of the most challenging political evolutions in the world, transitioning relatively peacefully from an authoritarian dictatorship with one-party military rule to a competitive multiparty democracy.
In a July 2023 poll, only about 1 percent of the Taiwanese demonstrated a desire for unification with the mainland as soon as possible and another 6 percent claimed they might want to see it at some unspecified future date (perhaps when they think the CCP may no longer be in power).1 Taiwan has remained separate now for long enough to develop its own cultural and political identity. Indeed, whereas Chiang Kai-shek arrived on the island in 1949 with the expectation and hope that his administration would one day return from the Republic of China as the legitimate government of all of China, entire generations have been raised to see themselves more as Taiwanese than Chinese. Polls indicate that over 60 percent of the population consider themselves Taiwanese and another almost 33 percent consider themselves both Taiwanese and Chinese; today, only a small minority of the island’s residents—about 3 percent—identify themselves as Chinese first and reject the Taiwanese identity. In October 2023, I attended a National Day celebration parade in Taipei, and the immense pride people on the street expressed in their Taiwanese identity was palpable. It became quite clear to me that even if China were a democratic country, not ruled by the brutal CCP dictatorship, few people in Taiwan would have any interest in a unification that gave up their sovereignty to the mainland. Just like people everywhere, they love and want to preserve their own nation and not be beholden to anyone else.
China’s own actions have also made a future peaceful Taiwanese unification less likely. The brutal crackdown in 2019 and subsequent destruction of the “one country, two systems” promise to Hong Kong—the principle that Hong Kong (and later Macau) would become a part of China but would keep their democratic system until 2047, fifty years following reunification—make any similar overture or promise to Taiwan seem laughable. If Xi reneged on that promise to Hong Kong after less than half the expected time had elapsed, why should the Taiwanese expect anything different? Moreover, they have seen the cost to Hong Kong of China’s crackdown in terms of fraying of Western business ties, disappearance of free speech, and the right to protest and democracy and now have a clear understanding of how their own daily lives might be impacted if the island reunites with the mainland. Who in their right mind would trust Xi’s word now?
This evolution in public opinion is particularly worrisome for Beijing, which tracks sentiment on Taiwan very closely. If you’re sitting in the decision-maker ranks of the CCP, you have to be increasingly pessimistic about Taiwan becoming voluntarily absorbed into mainland China. The imperative to use force, or at a minimum coercion, looms large.
Just like Putin, Xi is obsessed with his legacy, trying to emulate Mao and join him in the CCP’s pantheon of great and historic leaders. Along with Mao, he has been anointed as one of the four “core” leaders of the Communist Party, “a recognition by party members that they had become central to the party’s functioning and, by extension, to the fate of China and its people,” according to Xuezhi Guo, an expert on Chinese politics.2 Also like Putin, Xi has isolated himself at the top of the Chinese decision-making hierarchy by purging all opposition within the party and consolidating power and becoming, as Kevin Rudd put it, “numero uno, dos, and tres. All else is detail.”3 Another top Australian sinologist, Geremie Barmé, makes the point even starker: “Xi has outdone Mao. He has more titles and more power than Mao.”
In China, Xi holds three roles simultaneously. First, he is the head of state, a title that is translated overseas as “president” but in China denotes “state chairman,” a nod to Mao’s traditional leadership role. Simultaneously, Xi is general secretary of the CCP—the paramount leader of the country’s sole political organization—and chairman of the Central Military Commission, which makes him the commander in chief of China’s armed forces, police, and militia.
The consolidation of power around Xi marks a distinct turn from China’s recent history, one that’s important to consider both in the context of his own personal history and that of China. It wasn’t that long ago that China’s regime seemed to be developing into a relatively normal, albeit authoritarian, functioning government, one with routine transfers of power that marked it as being larger than any cult of personality. In 1982 Deng Xiaoping, who had taken office amid the chaos that followed the death of Mao, pushed through a new constitution that, via its article 79, placed term limits on the presidency—two consecutive five-year terms—but those limits seemingly never applied to him and he controlled the reins of power until his own death in 1997.v But in the years ahead, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao dutifully abided by the term limits, and there was every hope as Xi Jinping assumed the national trinity of titles in 2012 and 2013 that China had entered a new era of mature, if not democratic, governance.4 Writing as Xi took office, Nicholas Kristof hailed him as a “reformer” and stated, “Here is my prediction about China: The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.”5
History turned out differently. “Xi started reversing this trajectory almost immediately,” his biographer Chun Han Wong wrote, and by the time the Nineteenth Party Congress convened in 2017, it was clear he was setting the country on a different course from the one predicted.6 In February 2018 the government announced a plan to remove the article 79 term limits from the Chinese constitution. As Wong wrote, “The proposal shocked many Chinese. Their country may have attained the trappings of capitalist modernity—sleek skylines, glitzy consumer brands, and high-tech infrastructure—but their politics was backsliding toward what many considered a bygone era.”7
Xi has proven himself a crafty political player, one clearly on track to be China’s ruler for at least an unprecedented fourth term, perhaps even for life, and a figure who has defined (and redefined) what China calls its “fifth generation” of Communist Party leadership. Much of Xi’s story is a quintessentially Chinese one, albeit one that began with great relative privilege. His father was chief of the CCP’s propaganda department under Mao, reportedly involved in the infamous UFDW work and suffered, like many other individuals, from various purges and exiles amid the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. At one point the senior Xi was sent away from the family for seven years, and Xi himself, thirteen when the Cultural Revolution began, recalls being jailed multiple times growing up for appearing to be “anti-revolutionary.”8 His mother was forced to denounce him publicly and turned him away one night when Xi escaped political detention and came home seeking food and shelter, for fear her other children would be taken away by the state.
At fifteen, Xi was among some seventeen million urban Chinese sent to the countryside to work as part of a vast Mao “reeducation” effort. (“Everyone was crying, there wasn’t anyone on the train who didn’t cry,” Xi recalled in a 2004 television interview.) According to Wong, “Xi lived in a cave dwelling, shared with others, and typically rose at 6 a.m. to do menial farm work.”9 After years of hard work—during which he demonstrated a seemingly insatiable love of reading books—he ended up at Tsinghua University just as Mao died and afterward, with his father’s connections, began his own political rise. Henceforth, his career would take him from village secretary to military aide to deputy party secretary in Zhengding, a county in the north China province of Hebei, to (by age thirty-two) vice mayor of Xiamen, and then onward to municipal party boss in Fuzhou and eventually the number one provincial official in Fujian (recall that Fujian is the province on China’s southeast coast that looks across the Taiwan Strait at Taiwan). There, he got some of his first geopolitical exposure to the Taiwan issue, overseeing a reserve antiaircraft artillery division.10
By the turn of the millennium, Xi was clearly a figure on the rise, albeit hardly an exceptional one; in 2002, he became the head of the province of Zhejiang. “Zhejiang was a pacesetter in the party’s embrace of private business,” Wong writes. “He traveled abroad to drum up investment and greased the wheels for foreign businesses, helping American companies like Citibank, FedEx, McDonald’s, and Motorola set up or expand operations in Zhejiang. In a prelude to his future campaigns to promote higher-end and strategic industry, Xi blacklisted ‘backward’ manufacturing sectors, which were made to either upgrade their technology or leave the province.”11
As the party elite began considering the loyal ranks for its fifth-generation leader, the field of candidates was made up of just two individuals: Xi and Li Keqiang, the governor of Henan, the central province that lays claim to being the birthplace of the Han Chinese civilization some three thousand years ago. “Many fellow princelings favored Xi. They believed the party must be led by born-red officials who would never renounce their revolutionary lineage, as opposed to apparatchiks of humble stock—such as Mikhail Gorbachev—who might one day betray the party,” Wong wrote.12 In October 2007 both men were promoted to the Politburo as expected, with Xi outranking Li by a single position, a difference sufficient to indicate, though, that Xi had been tapped to eventually lead China when Hu Jintao left office. Li, an economist, would become the number two, the premier of the People’s Republic, but rise no further and die of a heart attack in 2023.
In the years since taking office—and in the years since he began to extend his own presidency beyond tradition and law—Xi has crafted something close to a cult of personality, one that tries to link him and the rule of the CCP to China’s long history. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd remembers sitting at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics—China’s $43 billion coming-out ceremony as a global superpower—and watching, fascinated, with other world leaders, including George W. Bush, as the hosts put on an elaborate visual and audio history of China. “The visual collage of Chinese traditional civilization and culture, with not a single reference to Mao, the Communist Party, or the People’s Republic. The intended impression for the world was civilizational continuity, with the current Communist leadership simply forming yet another dynasty of the eighty-three dynasties that had preceded it,” Rudd recalled.13
The new Politburo standing committee under Xi “comprises a secretary of his, some advisers and some buddies, all flunkeys, or courtiers and viziers at best. Xi has purged China of the factional style of politics that has existed literally for 2,200 years. At no point—except for the year 1966 arguably—did Mao ever have absolute power. Even at the height of Mao’s power, he couldn’t get rid of the people he needed to run the country.” Today, Xi has his own inspirational and education ideology-focused mobile app, Xuexi Quiangguo, roughly translated as “Learn from Xi to Strengthen the Nation.” The app offers both carrots (points) and sticks (quotas) to encourage use by party members, and as Wong reports, “The chore became vexing enough for some users to devise work-arounds, using custom-made software to simulate app usage.”14
There is no power in China but Xi, whose opinion stands as not just first among equals but first, last, and only. The decision to invade Taiwan, not unlike Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, will be made by one man, driven by his oversized ego: Xi Jinping.
One might think that Russia’s disastrous failure to conquer Ukraine—and the wide-ranging consequences of the economic and diplomatic isolation from the West it has suffered as a result—would give Xi some pause in attempting his own military adventure. While that is possible, we can’t rely on such wishful thinking alone. For one, the Chinese have an arrogant attitude toward Russia and its capabilities. In nearly every area—economic power, domestic political control, the mastering of advanced technologies, global diplomatic clout, the proliferation of domestic titans of industry—China has long ago bypassed the Russian Federation. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Xi looks at Putin’s failures in Ukraine and rather than seeing lessons for caution, simply assumes that he and his own reformed military would do much better, that where Russia is weak and easily bullied by the West, China is too strong and powerful to be confronted in the same way.
There are reasons, though, that Xi should actually be more wary about his capabilities as compared to Russia. Xi knows well that the Chinese military is highly inexperienced. Whereas Russia has been engaged in brutal scorched-earth combat regularly over the last generation, most notably in Chechnya and eastern Ukraine, long preceding this most recent invasion, China has not seen serious combat for forty-five years, the last time being its disastrous invasion of Vietnam in 1979. There is no one serving in the PLA who has fought or led in combat, small border and maritime skirmishes with India and the Philippines notwithstanding.vi Yet, if Xi assumes that he can deter the United States from coming to Taiwan’s defense, he very well might shrug off any concerns about his military’s performance. And indeed, when I asked a senior Pentagon official what lesson they think China is extracting from Russia’s war on Ukraine, I got a surprising response: “They learned that America will not go to war with a country that’s armed with nuclear weapons.”
WHY TAIWAN MATTERS
There are five reasons that Taiwan matters to Xi—and thus to China. These are history, destiny, security, geography, and ego.
History. Xi, most simply, sees Taiwan as a historical part of China. For generations, in fact, CCP leaders have seen Taiwan as special among all the various lost and former territories of previous Chinese empires.
In their telling, the island was annexed by the Qing Dynasty in 1683 and remained a part of the Chinese empire for the next 212 years, until the empire ceded the group of islands Taiwan was part of to the Empire of Japan following the loss of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895.vii15 And it is true that Chinese people on both sides of the strait consider Japan’s fifty-year occupation of the island to have been illegal and part of the Century of Humiliation, the period from the First Opium War of 1839 through the end of World War II when Western and Japanese powers dominated China. During this period of various lost wars and resultant unequal treaties, China ceded Hong Kong to the British; gave Taiwan, the southern part of current Liaoning Province, and suzerainty over Korea to the Japanese; and gave up to the Russians Outer Mongolia and parts of Manchuria, land that is now the Russian territory of Primorsky Krai, with its regional capital of Vladivostok.
For a hundred years, first the Chinese nationalists and, later, the Chinese Communist Party have been demanding to restore what they consider to be illegally seized lands back to Chinese control. And the second part of the twentieth century saw most of them returned, as the communists reconquered the de facto independent Tibet in 1951 and achieved the transfer of Hong Kong and Macau from British and Portuguese rule in 1997 and 1999 respectively. Taiwan, for its part, briefly reverted back to mainland rule in 1945 following Japan’s surrender in World War II, to be governed by the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT party, but then, following KMT’s defeat at the hands of Mao’s communists, Chiang Kai-shek and two million of his loyalists established a nationalist dictatorship on Taiwan and, in the eyes of the CCP, the island was lost yet again.viii16 True, there were other disputes that China has been unwilling to give up on—with Bhutan, India, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia—but Taiwan stands out as chief among the lingering wounds.
Destiny. Beyond its historic territorial relevance to China—an issue that the CCP has certainly shown itself to be flexible on occasion—the Taiwan question is considered unfinished business from the civil war by Beijing. Mao, after all, did not conclusively defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in 1949 but instead allowed them to escape and establish the government in Taiwan and lay claim to their competing vision of the Republic of China as the country’s true legitimate government. Mao did try on several occasions to depose Chiang and capture Taiwan, viewing it as a bridgehead waiting to be exploited by his American enemy, but his plans for a full-scale invasion in 1950 were derailed by the Korean War.17 Today, three-quarters of a century later, the island is still a thorn in the CCP’s political side, as the party’s victory will remain incomplete until that last “counterrevolutionary” outpost is defeated and brought into communist China’s orbit.
Security. The presence of US forces on Taiwan until 1979 had long encouraged Beijing’s obsessive desire for “liberation” because, to China, Taiwan was always part of a larger security equation. In 1950 Chinese ambassador to the UN Wu Xiaquan had cited and endorsed a perhaps apocryphal quote from former Japanese prime minister Tanaka Giichi, who allegedly said, “To conquer the world, one must first conquer Asia; to conquer Asia, one must first conquer China. To conquer China, one must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia. To conquer Manchuria and Mongolia, one must first conquer Korea and Taiwan.”18
China’s worst fears were seemingly confirmed in the Korean War, in which it saw the US defense of South Korea against North Korea’s invasion as an attempt to annihilate the buffer state, unify the peninsula, and secure a US-aligned government along the Chinese border—the American counteroffensive that brought US forces right up to the Chinese border was a provocation never really understood by Douglas MacArthur, commander of the allied war effort, that resulted in the massive Chinese intervention in support of North Korea and years of brutal fighting. Today, China views both South Korea and Taiwan as American vassal states and sees Taiwan’s inclusion in the US-led Western sphere as a potential threat and further evidence of attempts to “contain China.”
It’s easy to discount the insecurity and fear that undergird Xi’s (and the CCP’s) desire for Taiwan, but the geopolitical reality is that America often underestimates the degree to which our adversaries’ actions are driven by fear of our power and potential actions. For decades a widely held view persisted that the root cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fateful decision by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to place nuclear-armed missiles on the island in 1962 lay in Soviet strength and aggression, more specifically by Khrushchev’s perception of young president Kennedy’s weakness at their first summit in Vienna in June of 1961, compounded by the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion attempt by CIA-funded Cuban exiles. Recently declassified Soviet documents reviewed by Cold War historians Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok prove the opposite, however. It wasn’t American supposed weakness that drove Khrushchev to this dangerous and provocative move. Instead, he took the opposite lesson from the Bay of Pigs: he was driven by the fear that what the US-backed invasion demonstrated was not that America couldn’t overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime, but that it wanted to do so and could and would likely try again in the future. He feared that such a successful invasion by Kennedy or a subsequent US administration would endanger his hold on power in the Kremlin, as he would be blamed by hardliners for this failure, or that China would take advantage of a future loss of Cuba to challenge the Soviet Union for primacy and leadership of the communist world. “Our whole operation was to deter the USA so they don’t attack Cuba,” said Khrushchev to his top political and military leaders on October 22, 1962, according to the minutes from the recently declassified Soviet Communist Party archives. Khrushchev’s reading, of course, was profoundly erroneous—the last thing that Kennedy wanted after the Bay of Pigs catastrophe was to go at it again—but the Soviet premier’s terrible (and paranoid) understanding of American political dynamics led him to misread the situation and nearly provoked the end of human civilization in the process (and ultimately did bring about the demise of his own hold on the reins of power in the Kremlin).19
It may similarly take decades, if ever, for us to see the classified documents from Xi’s China, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, or Khamenei’s Iran and to understand thereby how much of these regimes’ bellicose policies and nuclear weapons buildups are being driven by of fear, either of American action or of appearing politically weak domestically, but the answer is almost surely more than we realize right now. While America’s leaders traditionally convince themselves of our peaceful and benevolent intent, it’s easy to see how China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea might view the world differently as they look out at the world’s reigning superpower, one who has a history of regime change operations and has effectively surrounded each of their countries with a network of partners, allies, and military bases.
The leaders of nations are historically terrible at understanding their adversaries’ thinking, in part because leaders—convinced of their own peaceful intentions but wary of the nefariousness of others—tend to underestimate how their own actions will be viewed by others while overestimating the aggression of foreign adversaries. History again and again tells us that fear is a powerful motivator for all sorts of aggressive actions—including Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, which stemmed from the empire’s intent to prevent the United States from interfering in its conquest of Southeast Asia.
Thus, it is highly likely that China’s policy toward Taiwan is driven at least in part by insecurity and fear that US containment of China could cause the CCP to lose its hold on power. Since Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan, the island has been viewed by the CCP as a geopolitical, military, and political threat—an “alternative China” that for decades has also served as a base for American forces and now represents a rival political system that is increasingly open, democratic, and prosperous. We should not underestimate the degree to which the CCP is concerned about the potential of Taiwan to be used as a platform and information weapon to destabilize China, even if that may seem like a totally absurd scenario to us.
Geography. As China’s power and military capabilities grew following first Nixon’s overtures and then Carter’s “reopening” of the country after 1979, and as it became less concerned about a possible US invasion that could snuff out the communist regime, a new (and old) narrative emerged about Taiwan’s strategic position. Namely, Taiwan was cast as the gateway to the Pacific and key to unlocking China’s role as the predominant power in Asia.
The waters around China in the East and South China Seas are very shallow; in the Taiwan Strait, the average depth is just 330 feet and in the South China Sea near China’s coasts, it’s usually 1500 feet or less. In contrast, the depth on the western side of Taiwan drops down to 13,000 feet right off the coast, as the Eurasian continental shelf ends. The shallowness of China’s internationally recognized waters is a major problem for Chinese submarines leaving mainland ports to go out on patrol: before they can get to the deep waters where they can disappear and evade US detection, they must go past the choke points of the First Island Chain, which includes Taiwan and sits at the intersection of East and South China Seas. Across the First Island Chain, from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines, various choke points are controlled by US security partners. Thus there is almost no path for China to project meaningful naval power into the eastern Pacific without breaking free of the First Island Chain, which is under the control of nations that view China with at best suspicion, if not outright fear. Beyond the concerns of the submarines and the surface fleet navy more broadly, though, stands the issue of the trade routes. China is uniquely dependent on global trade—its economy relies on energy and food imports, as well as manufactured goods exports, many of which are transported via the vital Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest shipping channels in the world and one that is often patrolled by US Navy warships. Chinese leaders for decades have worried about what CCP leader Hu Jintao had called the “Malacca Dilemma,” referring to the lack of alternatives China has to trade routes that aren’t dominated by America and its allies. Occupation of Taiwan and the consequent displacement of the United States from the Western Pacific would provide China with more alternative secure routes for trade with the rest of the world.
Ego. Lastly, an important element of Taiwan’s importance to Xi is his own legacy. Over his last decade in power, Xi has positioned himself as one of the great historic leaders of modern China—on par, according to the Communist Party’s telling of his story, with the founder of the PRC, Chairman Mao. And what better way to put himself on par—perhaps even exceed—the greatness of Mao than to achieve the goal that Mao himself could not and complete the conquest of Taiwan?
Mao had often discussed the inevitability of Taiwan being unified with the mainland. In a conversation with the newly appointed Finnish ambassador to China in 1955, he said “that China will not give up on taking over Taiwan, because the island belongs to them, be it then war with America as a consequence.”20 But ultimately Mao recognized that he was powerless to accomplish the conquest in his lifetime. In a private conversation with Khrushchev in 1959, Mao admitted, “The issue of Taiwan is clear, not only will we not touch Taiwan, but also the off-shore islands, for 10, 20 and perhaps 30 years.”21 Xi will cement his place in the pantheon of Chinese—and perhaps global—history if he manages to complete Mao’s vision and bring about the “Chinese Dream,” a concept Xi himself coined immediately after becoming the leader of the CCP in the fall of 2012.
In his very first speech as general secretary of the CCP, Xi outlined how, in his estimation, previous leaders had “failed one time after another” in modernizing the country. In contrast to them, he set as his North Star the achievement of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” with unification with Taiwan a critical part of that dream. Specifically, in this address given at the CCP Congress in 2017, Xi proclaimed that “realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a dream shared by all of us as Chinese. We remain firm in our conviction that, as long as all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, including our compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, follow the tide of history, work together for the greater national interests, and keep our nation’s destiny firmly in our own hands, we will, without doubt, be able to achieve the great rejuvenation.”22 In the years since, his government, the Chinese media, and other institutions have come to adopt the same aspirational language.ix23
As of this writing, it is clear that Xi is getting impatient. Whereas Deng had instructed the Chinese people to “hide your strength, bide your time,” Xi has overturned that three-decade policy and effectively turned it into “show off your strength, waste no time.” In 1990, following the global backlash against China for its Tiananmen Square crackdowns, Deng released a twenty-four-Chinese-character strategy that became a guiding principle for Chinese foreign policy. Thirty-three years later, Xi rewrote it with his own much more aggressive—and impatient—twenty-four characters:
| Deng Xiaoping Strategy, 1990 | Xi Jinping Strategy, 2023 |
 | Observe calmly, |  | Be calm, |
 | secure our position, |  | stay determined, |
 | cope with affairs calmly, |  | seek progress and stability, |
 | hide our capabilities and bide our time, |  | be proactive and achieve things, |
 | be good at maintaining a low profile, |  | unite (under the banner of the party), |
 | never claim leadership |  | and dare to fight |
| Translation courtesy of Moritz Rudolf, a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center of the Yale Law School, https://x.com/MoritzRudolf/status/1633667867836030977?s=20. |
All of these pieces—history, destiny, security, geography, and ego—come together to drive Xi’s relationship with both his own citizens and the world beyond. “The past is inscribed in China’s mental terrain in a calligraphy so powerful that it determines most of its approaches to the present. History therefore influences Chinese ways of seeing the world in a more direct sense than in any other culture I know,” writes historian Odd Arne Westad.24
Suffice it to say, though, that Xi’s reading of the shared history of China and Taiwan is not, exactly, how the Taiwanese see it. Nor is it a history and story that the rest of the world should entertain. It is therefore worth spending some time unpacking the narrative.
NEITHER HISTORY NOR “DESTINY” REALLY BACK UP XI’S VIEW OF TAIWAN. In fact, the great irony of China’s current geopolitical focus on “reuniting” Taiwan to the mainland is that the island has never really belonged to China. It is a dichotomous and complex island, one that’s both not quite Chinese but also not not Chinese. “Since the early 1600s, the efforts of Taiwanese settlers and pioneers, mostly from China, to create their own nation on the island have been suppressed or smothered by a succession of colonial administrations,” writes Jonathan Manthorpe in his political history of the island.25 Across its four-hundred-year modern history, Taiwan has always been wrapped in a certain level of geopolitical intrigue. Even the way its existence was first publicized to the West and Europeans in the sixteenth century is part of one of history’s great espionage capers.
In the 1500s the Portuguese ruled Europe’s connection to Asia; Vasco da Gama’s four ships and 170 crew had discovered the first sea route to India in 1498 and soon the country established what was known as the Portuguese State of India, based in Goa. For decades, the Portuguese brutally fortified the path to the Indian Ocean and explored Asia, reaching Ceylon in 1505, establishing a key port in Malacca (in modern-day Malaysia) in 1511, exploring to Guangzhou, in China, in 1517, and making it all the way to Japan in 1542. Along the way, they built a hugely profitable—and highly envied—trading network of spices, from cinnamon to saffron, and other goods from all manner of cultures. By the end of the century, Portugal had become the wealthiest country in the world. But in an age before the widespread availability of maps, none of Europe’s other maritime powers understood how or where to sail to penetrate these mysterious lands. The Portuguese route maps to Asia, called roteiros, or “rutters,” were closely guarded secrets, at least until a Dutch functionary named Jan Huygen van Linschoten arrived as an aide to the archbishop of Goa. There, over a period of five years, he carefully copied by hand the prized roteiros and made notes about what goods came from where and the alliances the Portuguese used to maintain their trading network. Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1592, he published a three-volume work called Itinerario that blew open the secrets of the Portuguese empire. It included not only the roteiros maps and key landmarks but also detailed information on the trading networks—where to obtain what spice at what cost—and strategic observations about where the Portuguese network was weakest. The first Dutch expedition to Asia left the same year Itinerario first appeared, 1595. “Within five years, Portugal’s supremacy in Asia vanished as Dutch and English traders, with van Linschoten’s handbook as their guide, swarmed all over the East,” writes Manthorpe. “It was a signal moment in Europe’s relationship with Asia and changed the entire balance of power in as profound a way as the acquisition of the secrets of the atom bomb by agents of the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century.”26
Within a few short years, the Dutch had moved decisively into places like Indonesia (which van Linschoten had singled out as Portugal’s weakest link) and colonized Taiwan in 1624, a place they knew by the name van Linschoten had popularized: Ilha Formosa, beautiful island. It was the name the West would predominantly use for the island for much of the next four hundred years.
Across nearly two millennia, Taiwan has been an island mostly of only attempted conquest, with chapters of colonization by the Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and ultimately Han Chinese. The first record of Chinese contact with the island dates back to 230 AD, when an expedition from the Wu Dynasty during the era known as the Three Kingdoms found it full of indigenous Austronesian people, what the explorers back then termed wild barbarians; the first Chinese maps called it I Chou, “a barbarous region to the east.” It took hundreds more years for explorers and cartographers to understand that Taiwan and modern-day Japanese Okinawa were separate islands, and it wasn’t until 605 AD that Chinese explorers returned to Taiwan, thinking it was Okinawa. In 607 AD a force of a thousand Chinese soldiers fought local tribes in three brutal, costly battles. Notably, its commander, General Chen Ling, returned to the mainland “convinced that taking possession of Taiwan would not be worth the necessary investment in blood.”27
The island and its native population sat largely unmolested for a thousand years, until da Gama arrived with the Portuguese and, later, van Linschoten’s espionage led the Spanish and Dutch to establish colonies. “The Dutch undertook the first serious effort at developing Taiwan,” writes Denny Roy, in his history of the island. “Establishing a government over much of the island, the Dutch organized labor, created mines and plantations, and introduced new crops and tools.” The colonial economic growth lured more mainland Chinese and, according to some estimates, this community comprised as many as fifty thousand individuals on Taiwan, which was also populated by a about two to three thousand Dutch soldiers, officials, and traders.28 Parts of the island, though, remained the purview of pirates, many of whom had sought safe harbor from the Chinese mainland in the wild island’s nooks and crannies, and one of whom—the so-called pirate prince Koxinga—defeated and ousted the Dutch colony and established a kingdom on Taiwan in 1661 that lasted for twenty years.
After a successful mainland Chinese naval campaign by the Qing Dynasty against Koxinga’s Kingdom of Tungning in 1683, the mainland rulers—who had little actual interest in the island—asked the Dutch if they’d be interested in repurchasing their former colony. Only when the Dutch refused did the Qing Dynasty assume control itself, loosely ruling the western part of Taiwan for the next two hundred years, until the forced handover to the Japanese in 1895. The island became known for its tea and camphor exports; specifically, in the nineteenth century, Taiwan was the world’s leading supplier of the lucrative and strong-smelling camphor oil.
It was hardly a stable or welcome occupation. “A backwater on the fringe of the Chinese Empire, Taiwan was not a prestigious post for mainland administrators,” Roy writes. “Not surprisingly, insurrections against the mainland authorities were frequent.” By one calculation, there were 159 “sizable” rebellions on the island in just the two hundred years of Qing rule—including, most famously, the 1787 rebellion led by Lin Shuangwen, who raised an army of three hundred thousand.x Island scholars refer to the Qing years darkly, joking, “Every three years an uprising, every five years a rebellion.”29
Even at the occupation’s peak, no more than the western third of the island was under the control of the Qing, and pirates continued to roam freely along much of the coast, leading to protests by the British, French, Japanese, and even the US governments in the 1800s. In 1867 indigenous Taiwanese tribes killed the survivors of the American barque Rover, when it wrecked on the island’s southern tip. The Qing leadership told the United States that they lacked any control over the indigenous territory; the imperial court refused any responsibility for the remainder of the island beyond its western parts and gave the United States the all-clear to avenge the attack itself. And so America’s Asiatic Squadron landed a force of nearly two hundred sailors and marines from the USS Hartford and USS Wyoming on Taiwan that June; the US force fared poorly in the heat, lost a senior officer to sniper fire from the tribes, and withdrew hastily. A second invasion force the following month—this time with mainland Chinese troops but a US envoy overseeing the operation—was more successful and reached an agreement with the tribes that they would no longer kill white shipwreck victims. That agreement, though, didn’t extend to Japanese mariners, and in 1871 a massacre of the crew of a Japanese shipwreck led to a Japanese invasion of the southern part of the island and a campaign against the tribes.xi30
Even as the nineteenth century ended, it was clear Taiwan had established its own identity distinct from the mainland. “The people who became known as the Taiwanese came to Taiwan to get away from the conditions in China. Taiwan became a place where Chinese individuals and communities could make a fresh start,” Roy writes.31
Most recently, Taiwan hasn’t belonged to “mainland China” in any meaningful sense since the end of the 1800s, after which the island was a Japanese colony for a half century and then functionally an independent country for nearly seventy-five years now. Mao himself said in 1936 that Taiwan was not part of the China empire’s “lost territories” and that he supported its independence, just as he did that of Japanese-occupied Korea. As he told American journalist Edgar Snow, an eager scribe for Mao’s view of the world, “It is the immediate task of China to regain all our lost territories, not merely to defend our sovereignty below the Great Wall. We do not, however, include Korea—formerly a Chinese colony—but when we have re-established the independence of the lost territories of China, and if the Koreans wish to break away from the chains of Japanese imperialism, we will extend them our enthusiastic help in their struggle for independence. The same thing applies to Formosa.”32xii
Indeed, when Chiang Kai-shek’s mainland nationalist government first took control of the island back from the Japanese in 1945, it was seen by the locals as just as oppressive and exploitative as the Japanese colonists. For example, in November 1945 the nationalists commandeered all of the island’s garbage trucks to haul the property they confiscated as war loot back to the docks for export to the mainland. (The Taiwanese response became famous: “Dogs go and pigs come.”33) Vicious fighting on the island between the KMT and the Chinese communists resulted in thousands of deaths, and it was only as Chiang Kai-shek’s forces lost control of the mainland that they began to view the island as a refuge rather than, effectively, as war loot.
Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to the island in December 1949 with his two million Kuomintang nationalists and the army began with years of instability and oppression, and in the first decade or so, both sides—Mao on the mainland and Chiang on the island—harbored aspirations of a cross-strait invasion that would depose the respective enemy and unite Taiwan and the mainland into “one China.” But as the 1950s progressed, those ambitions, always more aspiration than reality, receded, and even as Chiang’s forces continued a yearslong brutal campaign of terror against resistance on the island, land reforms on Taiwan kicked off a phenomenal period of growth and prosperity. Farmers saw their income double, worker productivity soared, and, in the 1960s, that newfound wealth provided the foundation for an era of industrialization that transformed Taiwan into the manufacturing powerhouse it is now.34 Chiang died in 1975 and when his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, passed in 1988, it created the space for political reforms and the unwinding of the one-party Koumintang military rule. In 1996 the island had its first open and fair election for president—the first free and competitive election in a predominantly Chinese society in the entire four-thousand-year history of China. Both of the leading candidates in that election were firm supporters of independence, and China was forced to protest by holding bellicose military exercises in the strait as the Taiwanese voted, to no avail. To the mainland Communist Party, the election and clear trend toward a push for internationally recognized independence were a strong signal that the chances for a peaceful, natural unification were receding.
As Taiwan’s history shows, it has never been “Chinese” in the way we (or the island residents) would consider it. “The raw truth is that no government of China, neither the current Communist administration nor the previous Kuomintang regime, has a persuasive legal or moral claim to sovereignty over Taiwan,” writes Manthorpe. “There has never been a Chinese administration that exercised control over both the mainland and Taiwan at the same time.”35
MAPS ARE STORIES—WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO FEATURE, HOW YOU ORIENT it, the scale—every choice that goes into making a map is an editorial decision that changes what the map conveys, who it is important and useful to, and whose narrative or history it tells. In that sense, it is easy to look at a traditional western map of China and miss the significance of Taiwan, the dot off its eastern shore. On a map showing all of China—the third-largest country in the world by size, a landmass larger than Europe, stretching across five time zones, some thirty-one hundred miles east to west and thirty-five hundred miles north to south—it’s hard to understand why Taiwan matters. But if Xi is wrong about Taiwan’s history, he is absolutely right that the geography of Taiwan matters to almost any future he—or future Chinese leaders—hope to build.
It might be better, though, to look at Taiwan on this map:
image
Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO. Image Landsat / Copernicus
To China, Taiwan isn’t a tiny dot off the eastern shore. The island’s geographic position is right smack dab front and center in the way that China thinks about itself—and has thought about itself for hundreds of years.
Today, it is easy to overlook the reality represented by China’s most famous attraction, the Great Wall. The wall, built piece by piece by multiple dynasties across more than two thousand years, was meant to secure the empire’s northern edge from the threatening and all-too-real invasions by nomadic tribes and horse-mounted armies of the Mongols and other enemies. China is today, and always has been, a country uniquely surrounded by hostile and, in the past, aggressive neighbors. It has land borders with a total of fourteen other countries, more than any other country in the world, and claims disputed maritime boundaries with another seven.
And it’s hardly a friendly neighborhood. Writing in their book, China’s Search for Security, political scientists Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell describe China’s understanding of the world as “a terrain of hazards, stretching from the streets outside the policymaker’s window to land borders and sea lands thousands of miles to the north, east, south, and west, and beyond to mines and oilfields of distant continents.” As the two scholars summarized in 2012, China’s neighbors comprise “seven of the fifteen largest countries in the world (India, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam—each having a population greater than 89 million); five countries with which China has been at war at some point in the past seventy years (Russia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and India); and at least nine countries with unstable regimes (including North Korea, the Philippines, Myanmar/Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan).”36 Since the end of World War II, China has had border disputes with most of its neighbors, who today include four of the world’s eight other nuclear powers (Russia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea).
Geography, it is said, is destiny, and the differing landscapes of China and the United States have long defined their historical trajectories. Unlike, say, the United States, whose border with Canada is the longest undefended border in the world and which shares a language, strong cultural similarities, and geopolitical alliances with Canada, China shares its neighborhood with large countries—like India, Japan, Korea, and Russia—that are not just culturally dissimilar but come from proud, long traditions of millennia-old civilizational empires themselves. In many ways, the US-Mexico relationship—hardly a warm or always productive one—is still more friendly and culturally and strategically aligned than almost any relationship between China and its neighbors. The border security picture from Beijing calls to mind the old saying “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”
As international relations scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write, “The perception of danger everywhere drives a strong impulse to expand: Only by pushing outward can China secure its frontiers, protect its supply lines, and break the bonds a punishing environment imposes.”37 That natural reaction to its neighborhood, though, only exacerbates the fear and distrust China’s neighbors have of the People’s Republic.
The role of the Great Wall in Chinese history is also worth remembering because of its relevance, strategically, to Taiwan. China, despite its giant landmass, has historically viewed itself as a maritime nation, one oriented toward the coast. The Great Wall was meant as a way, in effect, to close off the back door, to secure the northern border against threatening marauding armies. China’s western border, meanwhile, was characterized by deserts and mountains—also inhospitable—and the south was distant, isolated by mountains and rivers. The “center” of China, for thousands of years, was its east, along and around the Yellow River. “In essence, China has had its back on the middle part of the Eurasian continent, and that orientation has had enormous consequences for the country as it has approached the rest of the world,” Odd Arne Westad writes.38xiii And today, Taiwan, blockading China’s unfettered access to the Pacific, represents as much of a threat to Beijing’s global naval and trade ambitions.
Few countries in history have thrived on a global scale without being maritime powers. For example, Great Britain relied on the naval-economic link to dominate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, building a truly global empire on which famously the sun never set, an economic powerhouse Britain assembled despite having a much smaller population than the other two great powers of the time—France and Russia. This link between a strong navy and a strong economy was a lesson that the United States learned the hard way early in its infancy: when the newly independent colonies lost the far-ranging protection of the powerful British Navy, the North African Barbary States began to prey on US merchants in the Mediterranean. The US Congress, empowered by the newly ratified Constitution to levy taxes and maintain armed forces, invested in shipbuilding that eventually allowed the US Marines to storm Tripoli, an early triumph that inspired the famous lyrics of the “Marines’ Hymn,” and future presidents, from Millard Fillmore to Teddy Roosevelt, saw commerce and naval power as inextricably linked.
The eventual economic rise of the United States in the twentieth century is hard to separate from the global dominance of the US Navy. For the seventy years after World War II, the navy guarded and secured trade routes in every corner of the globe, protecting variously against Iranian speedboats, Somali pirates, Houthi missiles, and—not irrelevantly—Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait, moves that made the world safe. We take for granted today that arguably one of the most consequential inventions of the twentieth century—the standardized shipping container, responsible for the rise in global trade that has brought so much prosperity to the United States and Asia alike, among many other markets—would not have been very significant if the sea-trade routes had not been made safe for commerce.
Today, China is even more dependent on global trade than the United States but is only a few decades into any meaningful investment in its own naval fleet. Its global trade exists on a daily basis under the protective umbrella provided by the US Navy—a clearly fraught (and indeed long-term unacceptable) situation for a country that believes it deserves to once again become the world’s greatest power.
Currently, around 70 percent of China’s oil imports—mostly from the Middle East and Angola—pass through the narrow Malacca Strait, a five-hundred-mile-long passage between the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula that is the primary gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. At its narrowest in the Phillips Channel, the trade passage is just 1.7 miles wide, making the Strait of Malacca one of the most significant natural strategic choke points in the world, right up there with Gibraltar in the Mediterranean, the Bosporus entrance to the Black Sea, or the Strait of Hormuz at the base of the Persian Gulf—all choke points, it’s worth noting, also patrolled and secured by the US Navy or NATO allies. And both ends of the Malacca Strait pose potential problems for China: the eastern side would be easy for India, hardly China’s closest friend, to control if it desired, and its western edge is secured by Singapore—a key US partner and frequent host to US warships, albeit one that also maintains very friendly relations with China.
China is all too aware that the alternatives to the Malaccan passage, like the Sunda or Lombok straits, have their own geopolitical or security complications, not to mention that they are much longer and thus costlier routes. To mitigate its long-term reliance on the Malaccan passage, China has invested in projects like a Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline and another pipeline running from the Bay of Bengal to China’s southern Yunnan Province. It hopes, furthermore, to develop easier access to Pakistani ports like the deep-water facilities at Gwadar through the Belt and Road Initiative, but for the foreseeable future there remain few good options if, someday, the United States decides to close the Strait of Malacca to Chinese ships. An aspiring great power simply cannot allow itself to remain in a position to be blackmailed in such a way, just like early America could not allow itself to be blackmailed by the Dey of Algiers.
Xi recognizes this threat well. In 2013, his first year in power, he proclaimed the “great significance” of “building China into a maritime power,” a goal he saw as “important… for promoting China’s economic development in a sustainable and healthy way, safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests, realizing the objective of building China into a well-off society in an all-round way, and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”39 To Xi, “The ocean’s function for national economic development and opening up to the world has become more important, the ocean’s place for defending national sovereignty, security, and development interests has become more prominent, the ocean’s role for the civilized building of our nation’s ecology has become more apparent, and the ocean’s strategic position for international, economic, military, and technological competition has clearly risen.”
In the last two decades, China has begun investing in a so-called blue water navy, acquiring aircraft carriers, cruisers, and other modern oceangoing naval vessels, rushing submarines into service by the literal dozens, building destroyers at a rapid clip, and even starting to establish naval bases on the African coast. But all of that ambition and the PRC’s impulse to protect and secure further-flung trade routes is bottled up by geography—the lack of deep waters along the Chinese coastline and the western side of the First Island Chain.40 There’s a good reason that Douglas MacArthur, in a different era, called Taiwan an “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender.” As he said, “The geographic location of Formosa is such that in the hands of a power unfriendly to the United States it constitutes an enemy salient in the very center of that portion of our position now keyed to Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines.”41
MacArthur’s statement in 1950 is significant, too, in reflecting how countries far beyond the United States and China have material geopolitical interests in Taiwan as well. Taiwan represents a strategic crossroads not only for China but for two other key regions of the eastern Pacific: Japan and Southeast Asia. While we’re used to shorthanding Taiwan’s location as “off the Chinese coast,” a slight twist of the viewpoint shows it as the final, dominant island in the chain stretching up to Japan through Okinawa, what Manthorpe calls “the period dot at the base of the question mark formed by Japan’s island chain.” Viewed yet another way, it could be the northernmost island of the seven-thousand-island Philippines archipelago. As Manthorpe says, “In the full panoramic view, Taiwan’s geographic position presents three different realities at once. It is an offshore extension of China, the southernmost reach of the Japanese chain, and the northernmost stretch of Southeast Asia.”42
Given Taiwan’s strategic importance to the region, the United States, and the world, it is also worth imagining a scenario in which Taiwan does fall prey to Chinese takeover—either by military force or coercive threat. In fact, I did just that at a war game I ran with participation of US and EU officials, as well as of representatives from regional countries, at the Munich Security Conference in 2023. Sitting at a large round table in an ornate dimmed dining room of the historic Bayerischer Hof hotel—the usual location of one of the top geopolitical gatherings of the year—I presented the potential Taiwan invasion scenario, playing it out step-by-step and asking each of the “countries” to respond to each new development.
The players, all experienced international diplomats, politicians, and national security experts, pretended in turn to represent the United States, EU, Japan, and other relevant countries as they discussed various response options. Development by development, we laid out a scenario like that in the Prologue to this book, exploring how China might someday squeeze Taiwan and what tools the world community would have available to respond. When, at one point in the game, it became clear that the United States might fail to save Taiwan and that China might succeed in its objective to seize and subjugate the island, the reaction of the rest of the world—as represented by the players at the game—was shocking.
When Taiwan “fell,” the international players, all purportedly representing US allies, immediately told me, as the showrunner of the game, that they now perceived the geopolitics of Asia—and perhaps the entire world—to have just been indelibly altered. They calmly said that they would now consider China the leading power in the Indo-Pacific and would reorient their foreign policies to accommodate that reality. It did not mean that they would break their alliances or trade relationships with the United States, but they would, they warned me, treat the failure of the United States to deter and ultimately stop the Chinese takeover of Taiwan as a cataclysmic event that signaled the permanent US decline as a Pacific power. Even though they all knew that America did not have a treaty obligation to defend the island, they made it clear that our prestige and credibility was tied more to that objective than many Americans might appreciate.
Indeed, public statements from various US political leaders over the last two decades have contributed to a feeling of a broader commitment to Taiwan than might be gathered from carefully worded and ambiguous diplomatic communiques. Consider President Clinton in 2000: “We’ll continue to reject the use of force as a means to resolve the Taiwan question. We’ll also continue to make absolutely clear that the issues between Beijing and Taiwan must be resolved peacefully and with the assent of the people of Taiwan.”43
Or President Bush in 2001: “I have said that I will do what it takes to help Taiwan defend herself, and the Chinese must understand that.”44
Or President Obama in 2008: “I will do all that I can to support Taiwan’s democracy in the years ahead.”45
Or President Biden’s response in 2022 to a journalist’s question of whether US forces would defend Taiwan: “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”46
Beyond muddled and contradictory public statements and policy declarations, the participants in my Munich war game understood that if China had Taiwan in hand, there would be a fundamental new geopolitical reality: China would be free of the geographic blockade of the First Island Chain and could project power across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and establish control of the key trade routes. The PRC would be a power that everyone in the region would have no choice but to reckon with, a reckoning made all the more fraught because their faith and trust that, if push came to shove, America would step to their aid decreased drastically as a result of the takeover. It would be a titanic regional rebalancing, one where, the participants insisted, they would have no choice but to seek accommodation with China and take its interests into account, including at the expense of America’s.
And there is more. All of that critical geography, maritime trade routes, naval access, and physical realities obscure another key reason why the United States should care about Taiwan. For as much as Xi may worry about the oil passing through the Malacca Strait or his submarines passing through the First Island Chain, Taiwan is also key to the manufacture of the new oil of today’s tech-enabled economy: semiconductor chips. They are simply irreplaceable in the modern world, the building blocks of today’s computing-dependent life, and Taiwan—thanks to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and its founder Morris Chang—makes more of them, more reliably, and with more advanced technology than just about anywhere else on the planet. China has no alternative to Taiwan’s chips, and neither—currently—does the United States.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the geography and strategic relevance of Taiwan is such that the outcome of China’s battle for control of the island will define the geopolitics of the twenty-first century. No less an authority than Chang himself recognizes this, telling the New York Times at age ninety-two in the summer of 2023 that China’s ambitions are fully limited by the Western dominance of chip technology. “We control all the choke points,” Chang said. “China can’t really do anything if we want to choke them.”47
Footnotes
i By contrast, Putin frequently bashes prior Soviet leaders—including Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union and its spiritual and ideological leader, who he believes planted the seeds of Russia’s dramatic loss of territory and population after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In Putin’s mind, Lenin’s mistake was granting each republic its own recognition in the Soviet Union creation treaty—recognition that Putin feels was ill-considered because they had all been part of the Russian empire to begin with. (It’s an obviously historically incorrect view given that many territories, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, had preserved their cultural heritage and national aspirations. Some, like Ukraine, had even proclaimed their own short-lived states during the Russian Civil War, until they were reconquered by the Bolsheviks.)
ii Russia is not entirely wrong to think that without the Ukrainian lands as a buffer, its capital is uniquely exposed to potential invasion—a fact underscored by the ability of the Wagner mercenary armored column of troops to get within a couple hours of Moscow in less than half a day from the border of Ukraine during their mutiny in June 2023. Putin is, however, mistaken in his claims that Ukraine’s membership in NATO would make Russia less safe. Even setting aside the fact that NATO is a defensive alliance, Russia, of course, already shares land borders with six NATO countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and the recently joined Finland. If NATO had any interest in invading Russia—which it doesn’t—it has plenty of opportunities to do so already. And it is, of course, absolutely reprehensible to want to compensate for perceived and imagined threats by invading sovereign border countries.
iii Not the least of Putin’s problems with Ukraine was that his illegal seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014 had removed Crimea’s nearly 2.5 million mostly Russian-speaking people—a population that had much historical affinity for Moscow—from participating in Ukrainian elections. The removal of those voters, plus the growing antagonism toward Russia among the Ukrainian populace sparked by Putin’s aggression, ensured that pro-Russian candidates would be unlikely to ever again win nationwide elections at the Ukrainian ballot box.
iv This may have been the only assumption about the war that Putin got somewhat right. Western observers have been surprised by the relatively limited impact of sanctions on the Russian economy thus far—with GDP dropping by just a little over 2 percent in 2022 and resuming growth again in 2023.
v He accomplished this, in part, by allowing junior allies to hold the technical titles of president and general secretary, while he served “only” as the head of the Central Advisory Commission, a newly established body that was designed in theory to provide political assistance and consultation to party leadership but in reality held all the authority and power.
vi Then again, Taiwan isn’t in much better shape: Taiwan’s military has also not seen serious combat since the Battle of Yijiangshan Islands during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1955.
vii An American, John W. Foster—the grandfather of both future secretary of state John Foster Dulles and first civilian CIA director, Allen Dulles—helped negotiate the treaty that handed Taiwan over to the Japanese.
viii The communists officially abandoned their designs on two historic parts of China: Mongolia, whose independence Chiang Kai-shek was forced to recognize under Soviet pressure following World War II (independence reaffirmed by Mao after his takeover of China in 1949), and the roughly five hundred thousand square miles of Manchuria and other territories that had been seized by Russia in the nineteenth century, which were finally officially accepted as Russian in the border demarcation agreement signed by Chinese and Russian foreign ministers in 2005 in Vladivostok.
ix “The rejuvenation narrative is a well-understood and powerful one in China,” writes China scholar Liz Economy. “It evokes memories of the country as the Middle Kingdom demanding tribute from the rest of the world; China as a source of innovation, creating paper, gunpowder, printing, and the compass; and China as an expansive, outward-facing power, with Ming dynasty Admiral Zheng He commanding a naval fleet of more than three hundred ships and sailing throughout Asia to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.”
x Qing forces eventually captured and executed Lin Shuangwen, as well as his leading rebels, and—in a punishment common at the time—castrated more than forty sons of the rebels under the age of fifteen.
xi As a result of these invasions and colonies, as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s import of two million Chinese in 1949, Taiwan’s indigenous groups are now less than three percent of the overall population of the island, but intermarriage over generations and hundreds of years means that today an estimated seventy percent of Taiwanese have aboriginal blood.
xii Snow’s 1937 book, Red Star over China, would be influential in raising the profile of Mao’s communist movement and Zhou Enlai would call him “our best friend abroad.”
xiii In the 1400s, as China’s maritime trade flourished, the famous admiral Zheng He assembled a treasure fleet that included some of the largest sailing vessels ever constructed and over thirty years led seven far-ranging expeditions to Southeast Asia and beyond.
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