In August 2024, students at a Xiamen-based assume tank printed a paper urging Beijing to instantly set up a shadow Taiwan authorities on the Chinese language mainland in preparation for a full takeover of the island. “It’s crucial to organize a plan for the great takeover of Taiwan after unification,” they mentioned. The students had been writing at a fraught second for Beijing.
Solely months earlier, the anti-China Democratic Progressive Social gathering had taken workplace after a 3rd consecutive presidential election win. Unusually for a Chinese language publication on such a delicate matter, the paper made a number of frank admissions: that opposition to unification inside Taiwan had deepened fairly than softened; that Hong Kong’s post-1997 governance mannequin was ill-suited to Taiwan; and that many Chinese language officers lacked even a fundamental understanding of political and social situations on the island. The paper circulated briefly earlier than disappearing from China’s web, which underscored the sensitivity of the subject and the rarity of such candor.
Exterior of China, evaluation of Taiwan stays overwhelmingly centered on the mechanics of a possible maritime blockade or navy takeover, for comprehensible causes. A Chinese language invasion of Taiwan would rank among the many most economically and militarily disruptive occasions of the twenty first century. But the emphasis on how Beijing would possibly use drive to grab Taiwan has come on the expense of an equally important query of how it might try and rule the island afterwards. The Xiamen paper was notable not as a result of it represented official coverage, however as a result of it acknowledged the broader, largely opaque debate underway on this matter contained in the Individuals’s Republic of China.
As with early discussions of the battle in Ukraine, a slim deal with battlefield outcomes obscures the doubtless tougher and in the end extra decisive downside of a post-conflict occupation. Navy victory, even when achieved at extraordinary price, wouldn’t resolve the Taiwan downside because the Chinese language Communist Social gathering defines it. It could as an alternative set off a protracted and unsure part marked by acute governance and administrative challenges, potential legitimacy deficits, and sustained struggles between a victorious exterior energy and a resistant society.
Taiwan would current categorically completely different challenges from these Beijing has confronted in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or different peripheral areas. Taiwan is a high-income liberal democracy with a powerful political id, dense civic establishments, an impartial authorized tradition, a boisterous free media, and deep integration into international financial, high-tech, and informational networks. Governing such a society by drive would impose excessive and enduring political, financial, and safety prices on the Chinese language state, and in flip would form Beijing’s personal home politics and its worldwide standing for many years. China’s problem is nothing lower than the complete transformation of the construction and id of a society and a folks that see the Chinese language Communist Social gathering largely as an antagonistic entity.
In keeping with a latest Mainland Affairs Council opinion ballot, a definitive Taiwanese monitoring survey, about 7 p.c of adults — equal to roughly 1.3 million folks — assist a right away declaration of independence. A higher quantity assist everlasting separation from the mainland with out a formal declaration of independence. Below Beijing’s rule, anybody who maintained these positions would danger jail. Many a whole lot of hundreds may very well be disadvantaged of voting rights. All would probably be excluded from the civil service in any respect ranges of presidency.
Utilizing the metric of social gathering identification, the variety of folks whose political freedoms could be straight threatened is even greater. A few third of Taiwanese voters establish as supporters of the Democratic Progressive Social gathering, which the Chinese language Communist Social gathering considers to be an incubator — if not a promoter — of anti-Beijing sentiment. That equates to about 6.5 million folks. The paperwork, together with legal professionals, journalists, civil society activists, and even enterprise leaders, must show loyalty to the Chinese language Communist Social gathering on the danger of dropping their jobs or being despatched to jail.
Lest anybody doubt that Beijing has an urge for food for such monumental repression, there’s an instance shut at hand. From 2017, performing on orders from Basic Secretary Xi Jinping, the authorities in Xinjiang put as many as a million Uyghur, Kazakh, and members of different Central Asian ethnic teams into prisons and internment camps, the place they “underwent indoctrination aimed toward turning them into secular, patriotic supporters of the social gathering.” The area was positioned below blanket surveillance, and kids faraway from their households had been despatched to particular boarding faculties.
Inside China, some analysts are grappling with this actuality. Over the previous decade, Chinese language students, authorized specialists, and coverage researchers have shifted their focus to the issue of post-unification rule. With higher urgency and specificity, Taiwan is framed as an acute governance problem involving regime safety, institutional management, id transformation, and the administration of long-term resistance below situations of intense worldwide scrutiny. Whereas the use or menace of drive stays central to Beijing’s Taiwan technique, Chinese language authors emphasize institutional sequencing, authorized structure, and sustained political integration.
The Chinese language have in depth expertise in bringing restive peripheral areas below management, in Xinjiang but in addition in Tibet and extra not too long ago Hong Kong. “Although its officers would by no means use the time period,” within the phrases of a 2026 U.S. Division of Protection report, “the [Chinese Communist Party] has achieved what it considers unbroken success in its prior ‘occupations.’” On the identical time, Chinese language writings on Taiwan reveal persistent anxieties about legitimacy and capability, and the long-term sustainability of rule over a society that has developed outdoors of China’s political orbit for greater than seven many years.
The Chinese language Communist Social gathering has in depth expertise governing societies during which it arrived as an alien ruling energy. From the Fifties onwards, the social gathering imposed distinct fashions on Xinjiang and Tibet, that are each nominally “autonomous” areas, steadily erasing no matter administrative or cultural variations as soon as existed. Extra not too long ago, Beijing has accelerated Hong Kong’s integration into the mainland’s system. By means of lawfare, intimidation, the jailing of political opponents, and institutional penetration and co-optation, China has dismantled democratic politics, constrained impartial courts, hollowed out civil society, and introduced spiritual establishments below tighter Chinese language Communist Social gathering management. The promise of “One Nation, Two Techniques,” as soon as introduced as a sturdy mannequin for the primary 50 years of Hong Kong’s post-1997 handover, now features primarily as a transitional slogan.
Taiwan would current a problem of a far higher order. The island has been independently ruled for the reason that Nineteen Forties and a thriving democracy for the reason that mid-Nineties, however its resistance to outdoors rule predates trendy politics. Spanish and Dutch colonial tasks failed, and the Qing dynasty confronted recurrent uprisings. Japanese colonial rule (1895 to 1945) introduced modernization but in addition persistent resistance, typically suppressed violently. The Kuomintang’s post-1945 takeover adopted the identical sample: authoritarian consolidation, bloody crackdowns, and the suppression of rivals.
Since political liberalization started within the mid-Eighties, Taiwan has developed right into a functioning liberal democracy. Energy modifications fingers via elections; legislatures and native governments matter; protest is normalized; courts are extra impartial; civil society is entrenched; personal companies function below regulation fairly than bureaucratic fiat; and the navy has been depoliticized right into a nationwide establishment fairly than a celebration military.
These political modifications have been accompanied by a deepening sense of Taiwanese id. Regardless of Beijing’s claims of timeless “Chineseness,” identification with Taiwan has strengthened over latest many years and is now embedded in democratic establishments and social gathering competitors. Id divergence will not be incidental — fairly, it’s structural. In brief, trendy Taiwan’s defining options are basically incompatible with the Chinese language Communist Social gathering’s intolerant, Leninist governing mannequin.
A navy victory by the Individuals’s Liberation Military might conceivably shatter resistance and permit Beijing to impose management. However it’s not less than as probably that China would confront a protracted battle to control a society that views it as an occupying energy.
Over the previous decade, Beijing’s framing of the Taiwan query has undergone a quiet however basic transformation. What was as soon as introduced primarily as a venture of “peaceable unification” below a versatile institutional association has more and more been reframed as a job of “full nationwide unity.”
In China’s tutorial and policy-adjacent literature, Taiwan is now handled much less as a territory awaiting institutional lodging and extra as a politically advanced, ideologically contested society whose incorporation would pose acute dangers to regime safety. Because of this, governance, fairly than negotiation, has moved to the middle of Beijing’s strategic pondering.
For a lot of the post-Chilly Battle interval, Beijing’s most popular framing of the Taiwan query rested on the dual system of “peaceable unification” and “One Nation, Two Techniques.” Within the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s ascension to energy, the then-Chinese language chief supplied Taiwan a deal: it might preserve its governing, financial, and social programs and even its navy, so long as Taipei acknowledged it was a part of the Individuals’s Republic of China.
In recent times, nonetheless, this comparatively extra tolerant language has been progressively discarded and changed with an emphasis on “the entire unification of the motherland,” decisively altering the hierarchy of priorities and considerably limiting the scope of autonomy for Taipei. The emphasis on “full” unification alerts that acceptable outcomes should absolutely remove Taiwan’s separate political id fairly than merely managing it.
Beijing’s coverage had typically assumed that id variations between Taiwan and the Individuals’s Republic of China had been both superficial or malleable, and that financial integration and people-to-people exchanges would progressively soften resistance. Modern scholarship is extra pessimistic. Many Chinese language analysts now settle for that many years of separation have produced a definite id in Taiwan that’s explicitly tied to democratic self-rule and opposition to authoritarian governance. Id divergence is thus now not a secondary downside to be addressed after unification, however a central impediment that should be confronted straight via drive, re-education, and long-term social transformation.
Within the mixture, these shifts mark a transfer away from an accommodationist logic in the direction of a extra straight absorptive one.
In Chinese language scholarly writing, the fashions for taking Taiwan are available a cacophony of kinds. There may be “peaceable reunification,” “navy reunification,” “compelled reunification,” “governance-led reunification,” “negotiated reunification,” “good or strategic reunification,” “integration-led reunification,” “mixed reunification,” and so forth. The 5 most mentioned kinds are the peaceable, navy, compelled, governance-led, and good reunification fashions.
Essentially the most mentioned — and politically salient — analogy is Crimea. Russia’s 2014 annexation is usually introduced as a mannequin of profitable territorial seizure by a Beijing-friendly energy, providing classes not solely in conquest but in addition in post-conflict governance. On this telling, Crimea exhibits how Moscow blurred the road between civilians and combatants, relied on sympathetic native populations, and moved rapidly from occupation to political consolidation. Taiwan, nonetheless, wouldn’t provide Beijing a receptive public, and its distinct democratic id would probably outweigh any attraction to shared ethnicity. Crimea’s most important attraction, then, is that it was taken and secured quickly, a lot as Beijing would hope to do in Taiwan.
Chinese language students more and more acknowledge that stability achieved via coercion doesn’t equate to legitimacy. Compliance could be enforced, however acceptance can not. A society could also be quiet but politically alienated; orderly but psychologically resistant. This distinction is central to Beijing’s issues about Taiwan, the place separate identities are deeply rooted over generations.
Put up-unification governance, as envisioned in Chinese language literature, will not be gentle contact. It requires everlasting safety presence, in depth surveillance, steady political vetting, institutional oversight, and energetic id administration. These measures demand sources, coordination, and bureaucratic capability over many years. In addition they require sustained political consideration on the middle. Utilized to Taiwan, this raises the potential of long-term stagnation fairly than integration.
Beijing more and more understands the size and complexity of the problem it might face and but stays sure by political and ideological constraints that restrict its capacity to resolve core tensions. Autonomy is critical however untrustworthy; management is efficient however corrosive; stability is achievable, however legitimacy stays elusive. Any success could be expensive, contested, and unsure over the long run. At worst, there may very well be a complete breakdown of civil and political order.
On this sense, the toughest downside for Beijing will not be in taking Taiwan however in governing it. Whether or not the Chinese language Communist Social gathering can reconcile the calls for of management with the necessity for legitimacy stays the central unanswered query in its Taiwan technique.
The identical query must also inform Western assist for Taiwan. Gross sales of navy gear to strengthen Taiwan’s capacity to defend itself stay basic to its survival as a self-governing entity. Equally, the USA and its allies have an curiosity in strengthening exactly the sorts of democratic establishments and qualities that make Taiwan troublesome for Beijing to swallow. Reinforcing Taiwan’s democracy ought to take middle stage as a lot as bolstering its navy. The nation’s survival will depend on it.
Jude Blanchette is the Distinguished Tang Chair in China Analysis and director of the RAND China Analysis Middle.
Richard McGregor is a senior fellow for East Asia on the Lowy Institute.
Picture: Achabonn by way of Wikimedia Commons
