5

The Second Circle: Securing National Unity

Many Americans may not appreciate how central the Taiwan question is to the CCP’s political priorities, the extent to which this has intensified under Xi Jinping’s leadership, or how much Taiwan shapes how China views its overall relationship with the United States. Over the years, Taiwan has often been at the margins of most public policy debates in Washington about the future of US-China relations. The reverse applies in Beijing. It is true that Taiwan remains core business for US Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu. But there has often been a real disconnect between this strategic awareness within the US military establishment and the way both the White House and Congress have considered Taiwan’s place within the overall US-China relationship. That is now changing as tensions across the Taiwan Strait increase.

The fundamental tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan have continued since 1949, notwithstanding the signing of the three joint communiqués that established the basis for diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing between 1972 and 1982. China never renounced the right to use armed force to return Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty if it deems it necessary. For its part, the United States, while recognizing that Taiwan is part of China, has always rejected China’s right to use force to achieve its goal of national unity. No other country has the equivalent of America’s Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 (TRA), which stipulated legal obligations future American presidents must observe in protecting Taiwan’s political, economic, and security interests. No other country regularly resupplies Taiwan with the necessary military hardware to maintain defensive capabilities sufficient to deter Beijing from launching an armed assault. And certainly no other country offers an implied, albeit deliberately ambiguous, security guarantee to defend Taiwan with its own armed forces in the event of Chinese military action. The language of the TRA stipulates that the US will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts and embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the western Pacific area, and of grave concern to the United States.” The expansive regional scope of this language is often interpreted as a potential trip wire designed by Washington to help trigger wider allied participation in any future US military action over Taiwan. Therefore, in Beijing’s eyes, the United States represents the paramount obstacle to the completion of its “sacred historical mission” of national unification.

There is, however, a third and more volatile dynamic at play on the Taiwan question. This is the changing attitudes of the Taiwanese government and people since the island first democratized twenty-five years ago. The Taiwanese military dictatorship that lasted from 1949 to 1987, first under Chiang Kai-shek and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was always resolute in its support for a One-China policy, disagreeing only on whether the legitimate government of that China was in Beijing or Taipei. But the rise of the Taiwan independence movement and the repeated election of the pro-independence Democratic Progress Party (DPP) candidates to the presidency in Taipei have muddied the question of Taiwan’s relationship to the mainland.

After the Taiwan Strait Crisis of the late 1990s, Xi Jinping’s immediate predecessors changed course and sought to seduce Taiwan into political reunification through long-term economic dependency and eventual political absorption. Indeed, China’s long-term strategy of absorbing Taiwan over time by gradually converging the two economies into one, including by tempting Taiwanese investment into the mainland, has produced some positive results for Beijing. There is a significant constituency within the Taiwanese business community, typically represented by the Kuomintang (KMT), that argues that closer relations with the mainland are crucial to Taiwan’s fundamental interests. Nonetheless, this gradualist approach is seen in Beijing as moving far too slowly, if not thrown into reverse altogether.

This gradualist economic-absorption strategy suffered a significant setback in 2019 when, with Beijing’s backing, the Hong Kong government introduced a draft extradition law that weakened Hong Kong’s existing legal autonomy within the framework of “one country, two systems.” Millions of protesters took to the streets, only to be eventually crushed by Hong Kong police and the enactment of the draconian Hong Kong National Security Law, which criminalized most forms of protest. To the extent that reunification under the model of “one country, two systems” ever attracted political support in Taiwan itself, that support died with the Hong Kong crisis. Even normally pro-Beijing KMT leaders in Taiwan were forced to publicly disavow “one country, two systems.” The crackdown in Hong Kong offered yet more evidence that in an increasingly authoritarian China, domestic political and policy dissent would no longer be tolerated. This left Beijing with ever-declining credibility in its efforts to bring about a negotiated political compact with rambunctiously democratic Taiwan. Indeed, the Taiwanese people are now unlikely to ever yield to any form of “political deal” between its political elites and China. That being the case, Beijing is likely to conclude that political, economic, and military coercion are the only options remaining on the policy shelf.

Xi appears to have already concluded that the gradualist approach has failed. In his view, it has simply provided the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) with the time to cultivate a growing nationalist constituency on the island (especially among the young generation). It also allowed Taipei to permanently postpone the question of political union while imposing limits on how far economic integration was allowed to go. When the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen first won the presidency in 2016 and refused to accept the standard One-China formulation as the basis for continuing negotiations across the strait, Xi cut off all formal communications. When Tsai then secured a landslide reelection in 2020, based largely on a campaign pointing to the prodemocratic protests in Hong Kong and the impossibility of Taiwan ever accepting the “one country, two systems” model, it only served to further enrage Xi. He publicly reaffirmed China’s preparedness to use all necessary means, including armed force, to bring about reunification if other measures failed and warned that Taiwanese independence would “only bring about profound disaster for the Taiwanese.”

In a further signal to the United States, Xi stated that China would “brook no foreign interference” on the resolution of the Taiwan question. As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, he has accelerated the PLA’s military modernization and expansion program with the explicit aim of fighting and winning a war in the Taiwan Strait. The PLA has deployed more ships and aircraft in exercises and operations close to the Taiwanese coast than ever before. For the first time, Chinese forces regularly circumnavigate the island, reportedly simulating a naval blockade. And China has launched a concerted effort to further reduce Taiwan’s “international political space” through a diplomatic offensive to pressure Taiwan’s dwindling number of diplomatic partners in the international community to switch their official recognition to Beijing.

Furthermore, Xi has sought to tighten the screws on the Taiwanese economy, where Tsai has been more politically vulnerable. China slowed the number of mainland tourists visiting the island to a trickle, at a time when Taiwanese growth was slowing. Finally, there are growing accusations (by both the Taiwanese government and independent observers) of attempted Chinese cyberinterference in Taiwanese electoral processes and of concerted disinformation and influence-buying operations being waged in its media.

A key question is how much of this new approach is driven by a new internal political timetable for reunification. Following the centenary celebration of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021, the second major official centenary in the coming decades—that of the founding of the People’s Republic itself in 2049—looms much larger on the political calendar. Xi may plan to be in power for the long term, but given that he turns sixty-nine in 2022, time is running out for him to achieve his dream of returning Taiwan to the warm embrace of the motherland. To become the CCP leader who finally achieves national unity by bringing Taiwan into the fold would be to achieve a level of political immortality in the eyes of the party and country that rivals Mao’s. It would also be an accomplishment that would permanently solidify his political legitimacy against any other internal criticism. Against this logic, it seems increasingly likely that Xi will want to secure Taiwan during his political lifetime. Xi is a man in a hurry when it comes to Taiwan.

This timeline realistically takes us out to the mid-2030s, by which time Xi would be in his early eighties. If this analysis holds true and Beijing’s military advantage across the Taiwan Strait becomes even stronger, the trajectory for Beijing’s Taiwan policy is likely to become more hard-line throughout the 2020s (a projection bolstered by Xi’s order at the end of 2020 for the military to accelerate its modernization process to completion by 2027 instead of a previous goal of 2035). This is unlikely to change even if there is a return to a more politically accommodating KMT administration in Taipei.

While the “return” of Taiwan remains the holy grail of Communist Party politics, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia are also seen as belonging to a core set of Chinese national security interests. Each represents a confluence of external and internal security factors. Tibet, once the source of much internal unrest, has today been largely “harmonized” by a mix of heavy-handed security measures, surveillance technologies, internal Han migration, and cultural assimilation policies among Tibetans that have now been exported to other “problem” regions of China—namely, Xinjiang. Concerns about ethnic unity run very deep in the CCP, and Beijing still keeps a wary eye on Tibet. Tibet also plays a central dynamic in China’s strategic relationship with India, given that India has long played host to the exiled Dalai Lama and considering the two countries’ continuing Himalayan border disputes.

Meanwhile, Inner Mongolia, despite the resolution of China’s common border with Russia decades ago, also represents a continuing source of strategic anxiety between China and Russia. The two powers have competed for influence in greater Mongolia (encompassing the Inner Mongolian autonomous region in the PRC and the independent nation of Mongolia) for centuries. Despite its vast economic and population advantage, for Beijing, the political distinctiveness of ethnic Mongolians living along China’s border has become a growing concern. This has led to new measures to impose Chinese language and culture programs across Inner Mongolia in order to contain what is perceived in Beijing to be an emerging separatist threat.

However, in recent years, it is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that has been the object of the most severe security paranoia in Beijing—and the growing attention of the outside world. Xinjiang, which literally translates as “new frontier” in Mandarin, represents China’s western gateway to what it perceives to be the increasingly hostile Islamic world of central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. This sense of the region being a dangerous frontier is reinforced by concerns about the threat from China’s homegrown Islamic separatist movement within Xinjiang itself, which has long sought independence from China. This has included acts of terrorism against Han Chinese in other parts of China, as well as in Xinjiang (including one when Xi was physically present in the region), which have infuriated Xi and the CCP.

After ethnic riots between Han settlers and Uyghurs broke out in Xinjiang in 2009, Beijing appointed a new party secretary, Zhang Chunxian, to the region, who embarked on a strategy of economic development as a means of preventing unrest. However, the riots triggered an internal argument within the party, with China’s leading counterterrorism expert, Hu Lianhe, issuing a call in 2011 for a “second generation of ethnic policies” that would move to forge a more cohesive and unified “state-race” (guozu). Previously, adapting the Soviet model, the PRC officially recognized fifty-five minzu (ethnic minorities) as equal to the Han majority and granted them a certain amount of limited autonomy, such as the freedom to pass on their language and customs. Many Chinese scholars warned that changing this policy would likely lead to an escalation of resentment, violence, and chaos.

But after a Uyghur terrorist rammed a vehicle into a crowd at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and killed two people, Xi Jinping announced at a December 2013 politburo meeting that China would follow a new strategic plan for Xinjiang. This would include “a major altering of the region’s strategy,” in which the party would strike hard at the presumed root causes of social instability: the three “evil forces” of splittism, extremism, and terrorism. Then, in March 2014, Xinjiang-linked terrorists armed with knives attacked a Kunming railway station, killing 31 and injuring more than 140. Enraged by what was quickly described as “China’s 9/11,” Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration, and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship” that would show “absolutely no mercy.”

Soon village-based work teams were ordered to begin a “people’s war against terrorism” and were instructed to visit each household in their respective jurisdictions to identify any radical elements and then to begin “educational transformation” work. They concluded that up to 30 percent of the people of Xinjiang were infected with extremist thought, urgently requiring what the party described as “concentrated and forceful educational dredging work.” In 2016, hard-line Tibet-security veteran Chen Quanguo was sent to replace the softer Zhang Chunxian. He quickly implemented a “grid-style social management” policy that he trialed in Tibet, placing police and paramilitary troops at checkpoints every few hundred feet in the capital Urumqi; establishing thousands of “convenience police stations”; and deploying advanced digital tools, such as facial recognition software, to surveil the local Uyghur population. By 2017, a directive had gone out to use “concentrated educational transformation centers” to manage “key groups” in Xinjiang society.

This policy led to what Western journalists, researchers, and academics reported as the mass involuntary detention and “brainwashing” of up to one million ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. By the summer of 2020, reports also emerged claiming that large-scale “population control” measures were being enforced in Xinjiang, including forced abortions and the involuntary sterilization of Uyghur women. These reports led the US in January 2021 to become the first country to define what was happening in Xinjiang as “genocide” and a “crime against humanity.” The Biden administration upheld this declaration when it entered office weeks later. Other countries, including Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands, soon followed suit—along with a growing international activist movement that called for a boycott of goods made in Xinjiang and of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

Xinjiang has, therefore, become not only an internal concern for Beijing but a defining international challenge as well. So far, Xi Jinping has shown no signs of moderating what he described in 2014 as his determination to “unflinchingly walk the correct road of China’s unique solution to the ethnic question.” In 2020, Xi declared that the party’s Xinjiang policy was a “totally correct” success that “must be adhered to for the long term.”

Taken together, from Beijing’s perspective, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have long been seen as major challenges to national unity. The difference today is that Xi Jinping has adopted a much harder line than any recent Chinese leader. Xi, unlike his recent predecessors, has been indifferent to international reaction. He believes that the national security imperatives of “complete security” are more important than any foreign policy or wider reputational cost to the regime. Xi also believes that the rest of the world now depends on the Chinese economy so much that international political reactions to Chinese measures will, in the main, be superficial, symbolic, and temporary. The Chinese leadership has a long memory and can remember how international political and economic sanctions against China after Tiananmen in 1989 quickly faded away once there was money to be made. They concluded that the international reaction to the 2019–2020 crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms would be similarly muted. And from Beijing’s perspective, they were largely right.