China’s long game for Taiwan — Abbi Kanthasamy

JULY 3 — There is a comforting fantasy that wars begin with explosions.

A missile streaks across a black sky. Fighter jets scream overhead. Television anchors put on grave faces. Maps appear. Generals point at coastlines with laser pens. Somebody says “the situation is developing rapidly,” which is television language for: nobody knows what the hell is happening.

But the most consequential victories are often won long before the first shot is fired.

They are won in meeting rooms. In delayed arms sales. In vague statements about “stability.” In trade concessions, diplomatic silences and political whispers carefully planted in the minds of nervous voters: Are you sure America will come? Are you sure this fight is worth having? Are you sure resistance is not simply bad business?

That is the battlefield China prefers when it comes to Taiwan.

Beijing has no shortage of missiles, ships or young men in uniform. It could, in theory, attempt the most difficult military operation on earth: landing a huge force across a violent stretch of water, onto a heavily defended island, under the watchful eye of the United States, Japan and the rest of the region.

It would be an act of spectacular ambition. Also, potentially, spectacular stupidity.

Russia went into Ukraine expecting a quick, clinical demonstration of power. Instead, it found mud, resistance, sanctions, coffins, wrecked armour and the bitter discovery that maps do not shoot back but people do. America, meanwhile, has spent the better part of two decades learning that military superiority does not necessarily translate into political victory. You can take a city. You can overthrow a government. You can even hold a press conference declaring success. But eventually, somebody has to explain why the bill is so high and why the war never really ended.

Xi Jinping is not blind to any of this.

China wants Taiwan. It wants it badly. Not merely because Taiwan sits in a strategically priceless location between Japan and the Philippines, but because Taiwan is unfinished history. It is the loose thread hanging from the end of the Chinese civil war. It is a Chinese-speaking democracy that has built a vibrant, sophisticated society without permission from Beijing. Its mere existence is an irritant to the Communist Party’s great story: that Chinese civilisation requires one party, one centre and one unquestioned authority.

Taiwan is a problem not because it threatens China militarily. It is a problem because it disproves an idea.

So China’s ideal outcome is not an invasion. It is a surrender that does not look like surrender.

A Taiwan that concludes it is alone.

A Taiwan that sees American promises as negotiable, allied support as conditional and its own defences as an expensive exercise in futility.

A Taiwan that slowly begins asking the most dangerous question any small democracy can ask when facing a giant neighbour: Wouldn’t it be safer just to make a deal?

That is China’s long game.

History is full of countries that were not conquered in a single dramatic blow, but slowly manoeuvred into narrower and narrower rooms until there was no door left to open.

Finland during the Cold War is often brought up in these conversations, usually under the bleak and rather ugly term “Finlandization.” Finland remained a democracy, retained its institutions and avoided Soviet occupation. But it did so while living under the enormous shadow of Moscow. It learned to be careful. Too careful, critics would say. It calibrated its foreign policy around what the Kremlin could tolerate. It bowed eastward without fully turning its back on the West.

For Finland, this was survival. For others, it became a warning: when a large neighbour can shape what you are allowed to say, buy, build or align with, independence begins to resemble a very expensive costume.

Taiwan’s position is different. It is wealthier, more strategically significant and backed, at least in theory, by America’s Taiwan Relations Act, which commits the United States to help maintain Taiwan’s capacity for self-defence and treats attempts to determine its future by non-peaceful means as a matter of grave concern. 

But the emotional mechanics are the same.

A country does not need to be invaded to be intimidated. It only needs to be persuaded that the people who promised to stand beside it will be too busy, too divided, too transactional or too tired when the bill arrives.

That is why every careless word from Washington matters.

The United States has spent decades maintaining an awkward but functional arrangement around Taiwan. It recognises Beijing diplomatically, maintains unofficial relations with Taipei, opposes unilateral changes to the status quo and supports Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. It is a policy built less on elegance than on managed ambiguity — the geopolitical equivalent of carrying a tray of champagne glasses across a crowded restaurant during an earthquake.

Nobody loves it. But it has helped preserve peace.

China’s objective is not necessarily to smash that arrangement overnight. It is to bend it.

To make future American leaders believe that arms sales to Taiwan must be discussed with Beijing. To make Taiwan’s democracy appear provocative simply for continuing to exist. To make every Taiwanese attempt at building resilience look like an escalation. To turn the island’s legitimate desire to defend itself into evidence that it is somehow preparing for trouble.

This is diplomatic jiu-jitsu: persuade the world that the person wearing a seatbelt is the one causing the crash.

And Beijing has tools beyond warships.

There is economic pressure. China can squeeze trade, restrict tourism, target companies and remind every executive in Asia that there is money to be made by staying on the right side of the mainland.

There is political pressure. Taiwan’s democracy is noisy, argumentative and frequently theatrical — like every democracy worth having. China can exploit every local grievance, every election, every social-media panic and every politician willing to present accommodation as “pragmatism.”

There is legal pressure. Beijing has increasingly tried to establish the idea that it has jurisdiction not only over China, but over the waters, skies and commercial activity surrounding Taiwan. What begins as a patrol, an inspection or a maritime “law enforcement” operation can become the rehearsal for something much larger: a quarantine without calling it a blockade.

And then there is psychological pressure, the most effective kind because it is cheap.

A missile is dramatic. Doubt is durable.

Hong Kong offers another warning. The city was not transformed in one cinematic night. There was no single morning when everyone woke up and said, “Ah, the old order is over.” It happened through accumulated pressure: laws, institutional changes, arrests, red lines, vanished space for dissent and the gradual understanding that what was once permitted was now dangerous. The point is not that Taiwan is Hong Kong. It is not. Taiwan has its own government, military, elections and international relationships.

The point is that power often moves incrementally. It does not always kick down the door. Sometimes it changes the locks one key at a time.

Taiwan knows this. It has been increasing defence spending and building its capacity to resist coercion. Its proposed 2026 defence allocation was set at roughly 3.3 per cent of GDP, including related national-security spending — a sign that Taipei understands that deterrence is no longer an abstract seminar topic for men in suits at Washington hotels. 

But weapons alone do not deter.

Deterrence is a state of mind. It depends on what Beijing believes Taiwan will do, what Taiwan believes America will do, what America’s allies believe America will do, and whether all of them can still look at one another without blinking.

That is why Taiwan is not a local dispute. It is the load-bearing beam in the architecture of the Indo-Pacific.

If China gains control of Taiwan — by force, coercion or exhaustion — the strategic map changes overnight. Beijing’s military access into the Pacific improves. Japan and the Philippines become more exposed. Sea lanes become more vulnerable to pressure. America’s network of alliances, its greatest advantage in Asia, begins to look less like a security system and more like a collection of old promises written in disappearing ink.

And then comes the really ugly part.

Countries across the region will not necessarily respond by fighting. Most will respond by adjusting. That is what states do when they believe the balance of power has shifted. Some will build bigger militaries. Some will try to hedge between Washington and Beijing. Some may decide that American guarantees are no longer enough and begin considering capabilities that make everybody else deeply uncomfortable.

Others will simply accommodate China.

Not because they love Beijing. Not because they admire its political model. But because geography is cruel, markets are addictive and nations, like people, tend to make compromises when they fear being left alone in a dark alley with somebody much larger than them.

The United States does not need to promise war over Taiwan. That would be reckless theatre. But it does need to stop treating Taiwan as a bargaining chip to be moved around the table whenever a summit requires a little atmosphere.

The formula is not complicated.

Help Taiwan build the capacity to defend itself. Strengthen the island’s domestic ability to produce, repair and sustain critical systems. Work with Japan, Australia, the Philippines and others so that China understands coercion would come at a heavy political and economic cost. Maintain the one-China policy, oppose unilateral moves toward formal independence, but make equally clear that no future can be imposed on Taiwan through intimidation.

That is not a path to war.

It is the only serious path away from it.

Xi Jinping’s preferred victory is not a blood-soaked landing on a Taiwanese beach. It is a Taiwan that loses faith before it loses territory. An island persuaded that resistance is pointless, that friends are unreliable and that the future belongs to the largest man in the room.

The answer is not chest-thumping. It is credibility.

Because the surest way to invite a war is to convince an ambitious power that nobody will stop it.

And the surest way to prevent one is to leave Beijing with no doubt at all that Taiwan is not available for collection.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.