Threat of Taiwan-China Unification War

China’s president Xi gave a speech which opens the door to re-unify Taiwan and China using a war. Beijing previously assumed the Taiwanese would eventually decide to reunite with the mainland. The Taiwanese once widely forecasted that communist rule would collapse after the mainland’s capitalist market reform. KMT insisted reunification would take place only under a democratic system.

Xi has revived a civil war strategy by declaring the inevitability of reunification and threatening that “separatist” sentiments or foreign intervention will be met with force. President Xi Jinping stressed the importance of continuing reform but only under the party’s leadership.

A Taiwan-China unification war would defeat Taiwan but at terrible cost and without a sustained lasting situation.

All political parties in Taiwan are rejecting calls for unification under these conditions.

Proposal for Talks and 2072 Target

There is proposal for talks and a target for 2072 for unification. This is 100 years after Mao said China could wait 100 years to unify with Taiwan.

Fundamentally Rework One Country Two Systems to Make it Appealing

Another option is to fundamentally rework the substance of One Country Two Systems (1C2S) to make it more appealing to Taiwan voters.

Another is to use money, technology, and political leverage to manipulate Taiwan’s political system to advance its goals. However, this will not be sustainable.

Xi’s speech suggests that neither Taiwan nor the United States should count on Beijing’s developing ideas that are sufficiently creative to elicit interest from Taiwan.

According to the 1995 proposal outlined by CPC General secretary and President Jiang Zemin, Taiwan would lose sovereignty and the right to self-determination, but would keep its armed forces and send a representative to be the “number two leader” in the PRC central government, in accord with the One China, Two Systems approach adopted for Hong Kong and Macau. The Republic of China would become fully defunct.

Few Taiwanese are in support of “One Country, Two Systems” while some unification supporters argued to uphold the status quo until mainland China democratized and industrialized to the same level as Taiwan. In the 2000 presidential election, independent candidate James Soong proposed a European Union-style relation with mainland China. This was echoed by Hsu Hsin-liang in 2004 along with a non-aggression pact. In the 2004 presidential election, Lien Chan proposed a Confederation-style relationship. Beijing objected to the plan, claiming that Taiwan was already part of the China and was not a state and therefore could not form a confederation with it.