Zichen in Foreign Policy: Beijing Prefers Peace to Force on Taiwan
As KMT Chair Cheng Li-wun visits the mainland, CCG Deputy Secretary-General writes that China sees the potential for conflict as a tragedy, not an opportunity
Beijing Prefers Peace to Force on Taiwan
China sees the potential for conflict as a tragedy, not an opportunity.
By Zichen Wang, the deputy secretary-general at the Center for China and Globalization.
In a closed-door workshop in Hawaii in March on U.S.-China relations, an American participant asked a question that has now surfaced repeatedly in Washington: Does the war with Iran increase the risk that China will use force against Taiwan?
The question reflects a familiar assumption: China is a tactical predator, waiting for a moment of U.S. distraction to strike. But that view misreads how Beijing frames the Taiwan issue. Beijing is not looking for an opportunity to use force, as Peking University professor Jie Dalei and I responded at the workshop. It is looking for every possible way to not to have to use it.
A sharp reminder of that logic is the ongoing visit to the mainland by Cheng Li-wun—the chair of the Kuomintang (KMT), the opposition and largest single party in Taiwan’s legislature, from April 7 to April 12 at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. If she meets directly with Xi, which is likely, it will be the first meeting in a decade between the leaders of the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party.
To many in the West, Cheng’s visit looks more like capitulation than peacemaking. Critics argue that by hosting the opposition while refusing to speak with Taiwan’s elected government, Beijing is trying to bypass the island’s democratic system. In that view, escalating military drills in the Taiwan Strait, high-level outreach to the KMT, and the refusal to engage with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te or his ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are all part of the same strategy: coercion abroad, pressure within.
But from the perspective of both Beijing and the KMT, these contacts serve a purpose. While the strait is often described as one of the world’s most dangerous flash points, Beijing still treats the use of force as a last resort. The West tends to read China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law as a blueprint for war. But its most important clause is meant to restrain. The law states that “non-peaceful means” may be used only if Taiwan’s secession became factual or major incidents entailing that occurred, or if the “possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted.”
To be sure, the vagueness of the language leaves Beijing wide room for interpretation. But the law’s political and moral center of gravity rests on the premise that the use of force should be the most reluctant decision, not a preferred choice. The mainland would not see a war across the Taiwan Strait as an “invasion” of foreign territory, but a tragic conflict within a broken political family. As an old Chinese poem, familiar across the strait, has it: “From the same root we grow; why must we harm one another?”
Following the Communist Party victory in the Chinese Civil War and the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the two sides entered a prolonged period of separate rule under different political systems. Even after the United Nations General Assembly formally recognized Beijing as the only legitimate representative of China in 1971, Taipei did not claim that Taiwan and the mainland were two countries. It insisted that both sides belonged to one China and that they should ultimately be reunified.
That history matters, because it helps explain why the Chinese mainland’s attachment to reunification—however objectionable many may find it—is not viewed on the mainland as freshly fabricated propaganda. For the mainland, the people of Taiwan are not foreigners but members of a divided nation, and military drills are not targeting them but deterring secessionists. A war across the strait would not be celebrated as a conquest. It would be fratricide, detrimental to the overall interests of the Chinese nation and its traditional values.
As Beijing sees it, it can afford to be strategically patient and hope for peaceful reunification because it has sufficient strength to outlast the independence movement and the DPP, which commands at most 40 percent public support and does not hold a majority in the legislature.
Ahead of her visit to the mainland, Cheng’s personal history is emblematic of the shift in opinion that Beijing is betting on. She was once a member of the DPP who supported Taiwanese independence. But in 2005, she joined the KMT and served as spokesperson for then-Chairman Lien Chan’s historic trip to the mainland, known across the strait as the “ice-breaking journey,” the first such visit by a KMT leader since the end of the civil war.
That visit, followed by the KMT’s return to power three years later, eased tensions and helped move the Taiwan Strait into eight years of peaceful development, until the DPP’s victory in the 2016 elections. Cheng’s return to China is seen, to some extent, as an attempt to replicate Lien’s successful path and shape the cross-strait dynamics back toward peaceful development.
Chen Chih-han, a widely influential internet celebrity in Taiwan, has also moved from hostility to supporting closer cross-strait ties. From Beijing’s perspective, such individuals help sustain its hope that political attitudes in Taiwan are not completely fixed and that some people may want a closer political relationship with the mainland.
That might be overly optimistic, many would say, as polling on the island still shows that most people prefer the status quo, rather than accepting unification on Beijing’s current terms.
In the United States, meanwhile, the divide between elite hawkishness and broader public caution on the Taiwan issue may become one of the important external variables shaping the cross-strait relations in the years ahead.
A recent Brookings-Rand Corp. project showed that top U.S. policy experts broadly believe that the strategic environment in the Taiwan Strait is changing as the mainland “gains greater capabilities to influence the environment around and within Taiwan” and that U.S. policy needs to be adjusted. But there remain clear differences over the direction and scale of that adjustment.
Recent U.S. polling suggests that a majority of Americans would prefer the situation to stick to the status quo across the Taiwan Strait and do not favor direct military intervention in a conflict. In a 2024 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, 51 percent of Americans polled said the U.S. should encourage Taiwan to maintain the status quo, and only 36 percent supported sending U.S. troops to Taiwan in a contingency, while 58 percent were opposed to putting U.S. troops in a position that could lead to war with China.
Ryan Hass, a respected Brookings scholar and former U.S. official, recently observed in the Taipei Times that for a public already strained by wars in Ukraine and Iran and anxious about inflation, immigration, and jobs, the appetite for great-power confrontation is very low. A growing divergence between elite and public views is poised to shape political debates leading up to the 2028 U.S. presidential election, he wrote.
As for the current U.S. president, Donald Trump has said that he will visit China in mid-May. Beijing is likely hoping that he will explicitly express opposition to Taiwanese independence and adopt a more positive position toward peaceful reunification. How he will respond is difficult to tell, but Washington needs to recognize that when it views the Taiwan Strait through a military “window,” the work of keeping the political door ajar—however narrow and contested—may still be among the few ways to prevent a slide into a conflict that no one can win.
If and when Cheng meets with Xi, their dialogue will be difficult to fit into Washington’s hawkish framework. But at a time when conflicts in multiple parts of the world are intensifying, its significance speaks for itself. As Cheng said at a press briefing about her visit, “We want to prove to the people of Taiwan, and to the world, one thing: War between the two sides is not inevitable.”
