China Doesn't Have the Balls to Invade Taiwan

Why World War III isn't very likely

Noah Smith argues that Americans aren’t worried enough about the risk of World War III, and that Ukraine and Gaza might one day be seen as precursors to the next great global conflict. This argument mainly depends on the odds one gives of China invading Taiwan.

How seriously are people taking this possibility? As of this writing, Metaculus gives a 1% chance of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by 2025, 22% chance by 2030, and 33% chance by 2035. To resolve as YES, the question requires either that both the NYT and the AP report on a “full-scale invasion” of Taiwan, or China deploying at least 1,000 personnel to its territory with the purpose of putting the island under mainland rule.

Note that the question would seem to resolve as NO if China simply blockades Taiwan, and either fails or establishes indirect control over the territory, as long as that did not lead to an influx of troops. So if you had a question of whether China will invade or blockade Taiwan the percentages would be somewhat higher.

I would put the number closer to around 10-15% by 2035. The argument goes like this: invading, or even subduing, Taiwan would be extremely risky and hard. China may be a bit of a bully, but it is a risk averse one. There’s no way that they can’t know that trying to conquer Taiwan would pose all kinds of challenges and risks, so they likely won’t do it. Moreover, even if they did, the US and China would likely be able to manage escalation and keep it well short of any WWIII threshold, like superpowers have before in other conflicts.

Even though I disagree with Smith on the likelihood of World War III, I ultimately agree with his policy recommendations. The fact that China is risk averse is a good reason to stand with a civilized country threatened by a totalitarian neighbor. I don’t think protecting Taiwan would be worth a nuclear exchange with China, but one of the things that the war in Ukraine has paradoxically demonstrated is how superpowers can manage facing off in proxy conflicts without ending up directly killing one another, much less going nuclear. Taiwan should be supported because the benefits to doing so are high and the risks are probably low.

Fortress Taiwan

In 1949, Mao’s army sought to take Taiwan and other islands off the mainland coast, which had become the last bastions of the Chinese nationalists. The plan started with an invasion of the offshore island of Kinmen, also known as Quemoy, as a steppingstone to reaching Taiwan. The People’s Liberation Army was able to take the town of Guningtou, but their forces were soon surrounded and defeated, with nearly all of the 9,000 Chinese communists forces who landed on the island eventually being captured or killed. The mainland Chinese would shell Quemoy and the other offshore islands of Matsu during the two Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954-55 and 1958, but never attempt to take either them or Taiwan itself again, realizing this was beyond their capabilities.

Taiwan therefore didn’t end up as the last redoubt of the Chinese nationalists by accident. John Mearsheimer talks about the “stopping power of water” as a major force in geopolitical history. The concept explains why the UK has so often been able to fight other European powers through proxies, the US traditionally avoided the entanglements and rivalries of the old continent, and Japan was able to independently develop its own cultural and political history rather than at any point being conquered by the Mongols or the Chinese.

This article at the website of the Council of Foreign Relations explains the difficulties that would be involved in a Chinese conquest. First of all, the Taiwan Strait makes for difficult sailing, and one can only conduct a sea-borne invasion a few months out of the year. Moreover, it would be a pretty long journey that the other side would have time to foresee, disrupt, and prepare against. Kinmen is only 6 miles off the mainland coast. When it comes to Taiwan, the narrowest point between it and the mainland is 81 miles.

Moreover, there are few places where Chinese troops could land. The West coast has extremely shallow waters, which means that on most beaches the ships would have to anchor far from the ultimate landing spot and slowly move towards the island, remaining vulnerable the whole time, while the East coast is lined with cliffs. To get to major population centers, the Chinese would have to go through narrow passes and tunnels, which the Taiwanese can target.

The capital, Taipei, is basically surrounded by mountains, from which defenders would have the high ground in any invasion.

The Taiwanese would have plenty of opportunities to destroy the major port of the city and the tunnels and highways to get there, as they would be able to see the invasion force coming way in advance. The author of the CFR piece also discusses the potential for guerrilla warfare, but I’d say that predicting a population’s willingness to resist is difficult, and the argument that invading Taiwan would be hard does not depend on doing so.

Instead of beginning with a landing force, China might instead try to blockade the island and force it into submission. That is generally considered the more likely scenario. This could work, though establishing meaningful control of the island would still be difficult. Taiwan reportedly has a one year stockpile of rice and is working on the same for critical drugs, and although it imports most of its food, in the case of a blockade it would be able to switch to a more agricultural economy. So any plan that depends on starving Taiwan into submission will likely have an uncertain outcome and take a while to work if it is ultimately successful. It’s hard to even imagine what a victory ultimately looks like. Once the blockade ends and the government in Taipei surrenders, how does one ensure that a hostile population will accept what it sees as foreign rule when Beijing sends in its agents?

It’s possible that China seeks a “one country, two systems” kind of arrangement. If an independent Taiwan is an affront to the Chinese Communist Party, perhaps it would accept de jure submission to placate its pride. But Taiwan has a democratic system, under which it is difficult to imagine public opinion accepting even symbolic concessions on sovereignty, particularly if they are being forced upon the island in the aftermath of a blockade. We saw that “one country, two systems” ended up being untenable in Hong Kong, and so China had to eventually start suppressing the masses directly. But Hong Kong is a city that has always accepted outside rule and never had its own sense of national identity or military-security establishment. If some remnants of the old Taiwanese state decide to resist Chinese rule after being conquered, they can potentially make life extremely difficult for the occupiers for many of the same reasons that an invasion would be difficult in the first place. And then it would take actual military operations in order to subdue the island, with all the challenges that entails.

The Chinese Government is Risk Averse

Ok, so conquering and occupying Taiwan would be hard. But fanatical governments and organizations take extreme risks all the time. Many have wondered what Hamas was thinking it was going to accomplish on October 7, but in 2021 its members actually held a conference that included detailed planning about how they would govern once they conquered Israel. Religious fanatics believe they have God on their side, so can be extremely optimistic with regards to the likely outcomes of their actions. This also explains how ISIS burned itself out after taking huge portions of Syria and Iraq.

This means that, to decide how likely China is to invade Taiwan, we have to take seriously the ideology, motivations, and beliefs of Communist party leaders, along with their general attitude towards risk. Analysts have noted that China has in recent years taken aggressive stands towards its neighbors, namely by building artificial islands, laying claim to territorial waters beyond what it is allowed under international law, and generally trying to bully them over territorial disputes. Hawks like Noah Smith sometimes point to these facts to imply that an attempt to conquer Taiwan wouldn’t represent a radical break from past behavior.

Yet this way of thinking about the issue is potentially misleading. Although China often engages in bullying behavior, it has shown a consistent unwillingness to commit troops to foreign conflicts or cause irreparable damage to relations with the West.

The last war China fought was against Vietnam, with the last major engagement being in 1979 or 1984, depending on how you count. That makes 40 years without a war, if we don’t count things like the border skirmishes with India in 2020 and 2021. Most analysts don’t, as there’s usually a threshold for how many people have to die for something to be considered a war, and a few dozen doesn’t make the cut. Meanwhile, Wikipedia lists 12 wars involving the US since 2000 alone.

There appears to be a paradox here, where China has territorial disputes with nearly all of its neighbors and is doing much to antagonize them, but has gone nearly half a century without any disputes actually leading to armed conflict. I think one can solve this seeming contradiction by assuming that China wants to push around its neighbors, but only when the risks are low. Shooting water cannons at Filipino fishing vessels is not going to lead to a major war or even international sanctions. China sees itself as much more powerful than its neighbors, and believes that seizing the resources in the seas far off its coast are worth the backlash to doing so. What the thinking is here, I don’t know, as it seems to me like it’s more important to have good relations with other states. Perhaps this is a matter of national psychology, in that China’s growth makes it believe that it is entitled to certain privileges. Or maybe there are public choice reasons involved, and claiming the South China Sea functions as a way to help drive profits to state-owned enterprises.

Invading Taiwan would be risky and costly, and not in the same universe as anything China has done abroad in the post-Mao era. Even the 1979 invasion that started the conflict with Vietnam was supposed to be a small and limited engagement. According to Ezra Vogel’s biography, Deng decided that “China should ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’ by invading, taking several county capitals to show that it could penetrate further, and then withdrawing quickly.” One can contrast to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which had precursors in Putin’s war against Georgia in 2008, the intervention in Syria, his involvement in multiple conflicts in Africa, and the original incursion into Ukraine in 2014. In other words, Putin had given us a lot of indications that he is the kind of guy to sometimes take the risk of going to war in order to solve a geopolitical problem. The same is simply not true for China.

We could take an even broader perspective and see Chinese behavior at home mapping on to the general risk aversion we see abroad. One way to understand the persecution of the Uighurs is as a massive overreaction to a small but real terrorist threat, similar to what the US did after 9/11. But Uighurs living within China are powerless, so Beijing felt comfortable pushing them around rather than take any risk that Islamism could eventually threaten the territorial integrity of the state. The clampdown on unarmed protestors in Hong Kong similarly follows the pattern of willingness to use force only against civilians who can’t fight back. During the coronavirus pandemic, I was baffled as to why China was sticking to Zero Covid for years after the policy could have made any sense, and concluded that they were just really into safetyism. But weirdly enough, they wouldn’t even mandate vaccines for the elderly, so there’s some very odd combination of values at play here, which is difficult to fully describe but doesn’t seem conducive to launching a foreign war.

This isn’t how people usually perceive China. Much of the coverage of the country is undertaken through the lens of geopolitical rivalry, which tends to make us see the regime as cold and ruthless. It is, but the ultimate question is in the service of what goals. I think the aim is mainly regime and societal stability rather than anything grander like world domination or a vision of national greatness. There’s also a tendency for right-wingers to fantasize about woke America one day being humbled by more traditionalist Chinese and Russians. My view is that the regime combines the prudishness and closed-mindedness of 1950s America with the contempt for individual rights, extreme risk-aversion, and emphasis on safetyism that characterize the modern left. Whatever the opposite of the Faustian Spirit is, that’s China.

Beijing seems to follow this pattern of being risk avoidant specifically when it comes to the question of Taiwan. In recent years, it has generally been the US that has been escalating and deviating from the status quo. Consider the following:

1. Traditionally, the US has adopted a policy of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to the question of whether it would defend Taiwan. Biden has changed this, and now openly says that in case of war the US will be involved.

2. Nancy Pelosi in 2022 became the first House Speaker since 1997 to visit Taiwan. In response, the Chinese had a few military exercises around the island.

3. In August of last year, the US for the first time ever approved the transfer of equipment to Taiwan under the State Department’s foreign military financing program, which previously had only worked with sovereign nations.

4. The House just allocated over $8 billion in aid for Taiwan and to deal with Indo-Pacific security issues, which is part of a package that is expected to be passed by the Senate and signed by the president this week.

For its part, China has been increasing “grey zone harassment” of Taiwan in recent years, at least according to the Taiwanese defense ministry, which means doing things like sending drones and balloons to collect intelligence. Seems like a pretty weak response to another superpower sending weapons and Nancy Pelosi to territory you consider your own.

China Understands the Difficulties of Conquering Taiwan

Let’s say I’m right that conquering Taiwan would be difficult and the Chinese are risk averse. The next question becomes whether they might just be deluded. A nation led by a bunch of cowardly gerontocrats could still take what is objectively a major risk if it can convince itself that the project is actually easy.

On acceptance of risk in international affairs, Putin seems to be about midway between the Chinese and Islamists. One reason he invaded Ukraine was that his regime relied on bad intelligence and thought ruling the country would be easy. Military experts doubted he would go in based on the fact that he hadn’t amassed enough troops to occupy a nation as large as Ukraine, but the plan makes sense if you imagine that Putin thought his opponent would quickly fold. Before being too hard on the Russian president, recall that it was the consensus among Western analysts as well that the regime in Kiev would collapse.

Unlike Ukraine, what makes Taiwan difficult to conquer is the basic facts of its geography. Putin could delude himself about the state of public opinion in Ukraine, or how many sympathizers he had in high places. His miscalculation depended on intangible factors related to mass sentiment and the internal politics of Ukraine. In contrast, for China to be deluded about the challenge it would face in Taiwan, it would have to somehow be misinformed about things like where God placed mountains and how many ways there are to get to Taipei.

The CCP has for 74 years now taken the position that Taiwan is a renegade province that eventually must be brought under control of the mainland. At the Battle of Guningtou, they learned the difficulties involved in trying to take even a much smaller and closer island. Taiwan proper is further away than Kinmen, more populated, has a high and growing level of anti-mainland sentiment, and now has been armed to the teeth by the United States. There may be governments that would nonetheless roll the dice in the face of such circumstances, but there is little to indicate that the Chinese system produces such leaders.

How It Could Happen

Note that I give up to a 15% chance of China trying to blockade or invade Taiwan, so I believe the risk is still substantial, even if it’s lower than most think. How might I be wrong? Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the article that really convinced me that it was going to happen was this piece by Rob Lee. Basically, if Russia wanted to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence, the window of opportunity to change the current trajectory was closing. Some people argue that Putin’s rationale for the war didn’t make any sense because Ukraine wasn’t going to join NATO anytime soon. This is true, but Lee points out that the US was heavily arming Ukraine and deepening military cooperation in the years before the invasion. Also, the Ukrainian state was becoming stronger as it was cracking down on pro-Russian subversion and political activism, as was highlighted by new restrictions on the use of the Russian language. Basically, every year that went by brought Ukraine closer and closer to the West, and made it better able to defend itself.

Putin was wrong that marching to Kiev was going to be easy in 2022. But he was correct in assuming that he had better odds in 2022 than he would have had in 2028 or 2032. And he probably regrets not having gone all the way in 2014, when there were actually pro-Russian demonstrations in the East and it would’ve been easier still. His choice as of 2022 was basically to either accept going down in history as the leader who lost Ukraine forever, or do something drastic to try and change the situation on the ground. He chose the latter, and while we have no reason to accept the moral legitimacy of the supposed Russian claims to Ukraine, we can at least understand Putin’s logic.

The analogy to the situation of Taiwan is obvious enough. The US is increasing its support, both in terms of weapons provided and the commitment to its defense. In another parallel to Ukraine, young people in Taiwan are more likely to identify as “primarily Taiwanese” instead of “Taiwanese and Chinese” or “Primarily Chinese.”

Even among those 35 and older, 61% see themselves as primarily Taiwanese, which goes to show how little support China would have if it tried to become an occupying force. Moreover, in the case of war, public opinion would likely become even more anti-mainland, in the same way that pro-Russian sentiment collapsed in Ukraine in February 2022.

Population trends are another potential consideration here. Total fertility rate in Taiwan has hovered around 1 for two decades now. This could’ve provided an argument for China to just wait until the island started to depopulate and became easier to conquer. But in recent years, China has converged towards East Asian norms too, meaning that long term population trends aren’t as clearly in favor of one side or the other. And since Taiwan is much richer and freer than China, it could probably find it easier to replenish its population through immigration. As things stand, 3.84% of the Taiwanese population is composed of foreign residents, compared to an immigrant population of 0.1% in China. Now changes in the exact population ratio probably won’t matter that much for a while since as of now the number of people in China is something like 60x that of Taiwan, which isn’t catching up anytime soon. But as China looks to the future and realizes that it’s going to become a much more gerontocratic society, which is going to have to invest relatively more in things like elder care and less in making war, it may see another reason why it’s either now or never to settle the Taiwan issue.

China might not invade Taiwan because doing so would be hard. But China may try to invade Taiwan in the immediate future because doing so will only become harder as time goes on. Admiral John Aquilino, head of the Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress last month that China’s military buildup indicates that it will be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Of course, he would say that, since he wants Congress to give him money. But if China is ever going to do it, the country probably needs to take action sooner rather than later.

Does Xi Jinping therefore favor stability and a comfortable life for his country and himself, or is he more like Putin or Hamas, thinking in terms of history? China under his rule has been characterized by fear. Of feminists, Islamists, Western ideas, covid. The CCP has even come to fear economic growth that is happening too fast, marking a break with previous post-Mao governments.

I may be wrong in reading the regime. Whereas I see risk aversion and cowardice, China might just be showing a strong commitment to collectivist values, which would indicate that they will not be able to accept a gradual Taiwanese drift towards independence. Yet in the end, if they want to stop it, the leadership of the CCP will have to wake up one day and pull the trigger on their own October 7 or February 24. It’s just difficult for me to imagine.

We Should Still Help Taiwan

Because I disagree with most China hawks on the likelihood of an invasion of Taiwan, one might expect me to disagree with their policy conclusions. Yet I pretty much support aid for Taiwan, and taking steps to make us better prepared for conflict with China like increasing our ship-building capabilities. I think democratic capitalist societies are good, and we should help defend them at a reasonable cost. So providing weapons, aid, and moral support all make sense, as this would make China’s job harder. The point is to convince Beijing that it isn’t going to be worth it, and they should just keep making dramatic statements about how Taiwan is part of one forever united China without ever acting to achieve that end. It’s of course possible that American support makes Beijing even more desperate and it lashes out with an invasion, but I think that the desire to finish the Chinese Civil War has always been there, with the problem being the difficulties and costs involved in actually being able to do so.

Moreover, even if we support Taiwan and promise to come to its aid in case of an invasion or blockade, I don’t think it necessarily means total war between the US and China. The trajectory of Ukraine is instructive here. Ever since Putin invaded, MAGA types have been shrieking about how we’re sleepwalking into World War III. Yet the war has demonstrated how hesitant both sides have been to escalate the conflict, and their ability to communicate this fact. There are red lines that neither party has been willing to cross. The US doesn’t send soldiers to directly kill Russians, and Russia does not shoot missiles outside of Ukraine. This modus vivendi is achieved through direct communication and implicit signals sent through the actions each side in the conflict takes. There are a lot of steps between “do nothing” and “nuclear war.”

Nuclear armed superpowers have faced off in proxy conflicts before: in Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1965-1973), Afghanistan (1979-1989), and now Ukraine (2014- ). In the case of Korea, the Soviets actually took part in the war while denying that they were doing so, a fiction that both sides found useful to maintain, even when planes from the two superpowers crossed paths in the air. If China decides to try and take Taiwan, there would be much that the US could do short of firing on Chinese ships. The West can impose sanctions, cut off trade with China, sever relations, and ultimately provide support to those in Taiwan who are willing to resist the CCP. If we go high enough on the escalation ladder that we’re in the territory of nuclear war, I suggest we deescalate and accept Chinese dominance over Taiwan. But there’s no reason to give an entire nation away before the conflict has even started.

An article in the NYT explains how the US could support Taiwan in the case of war while trying to avoid a direct confrontation with China.

If China decides to establish a naval blockade around Taiwan, American officials would probably study which avenue of resupplying Taiwan — by sea or by air — would offer the least likelihood of bringing Chinese and American ships, aircraft and submarines into direct conflict.

One proposition would involve sending U.S. cargo planes with supplies from bases in Japan and Guam to Taiwan’s east coast. That way, any Chinese fighters trying to shoot them down would have to fly over Taiwan and risk being downed by Taiwanese warplanes.

“The sheer amount of materiel that would likely be needed in case of war is formidable, and getting them through would be difficult, though may be doable,” said Eric Wertheim, a defense consultant and author of “The Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World.” “The question is: How much risk is China and the White House willing to take in terms of enforcing or breaking through a blockade, respectively, and can it be sustained?”

If you’re worried about World War III, the risk of that is even smaller than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, since I consider the latter a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the former. One could in theory invent a scenario where WWIII starts because Putin tries to take Poland or the Baltics, but the situation in Ukraine strikes me as unique. This was the country that was historically closest to Russia, and which was being armed by the West while not actually in NATO. Moreover, Putin could convince himself that he had enough internal support in Ukraine to make conquering and ruling over it easy, or no more than a manageable challenge. Post-Soviet Russia never invaded Poland or the Baltics before 2022, and now the conflict with Ukraine is likely to occupy Putin for the rest of his life. Noah Smith seems to imagine that if China invades Taiwan he might suddenly decide the cost-benefit to invading NATO member countries suddenly makes sense, but it’s hard to see why anyone would think like this. The delusions that went into trying to conquer Ukraine are at least somewhat understandable given Russian views of history and geopolitics, while expanding the war to other nations would not be.

For something to count as World War III, I think you need to see direct shooting between the US on one side, and at least one of either China or Russia on the other. I think we should also require some kind of minimum number of deaths. WWI had 20 million, and WWII had 75 million, so let’s say 5 million for the next one. I give an invasion of Taiwan a 15% chance by 2035, and WWIII about 2%. We could probably take it down from 2% to less than 1% by not caring about Taiwan at all. The current American policy appears to involve backing Taiwan for now and just seeing where the escalation ladder takes us if and when war comes, and this seems to me the best approach. Overall, I think intangible and unknowable considerations come down in favor of intervention, since the territorial integrity norm is very important and worth defending, although given the ambiguous legal status of Taiwan, letting China annex it wouldn’t be as bad as rewarding Putin’s aggression with extra land from Ukraine.

Finally, I think we should all get past the idea that we can have a geopolitical environment where vibes don’t matter. Western civilization taking a stronger stand against its enemies is likely to make for healthier societies at home and abroad. The liberal democratic system is worth defending, which means it is good to support Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. In two situations this involves being in favor of the weaker party and in one the stronger, but what’s important is being on the side of the more open society in each case. This goes beyond the direct good inherent in spreading and defending liberal institutions. There’s also an indirect effect of building and maintaining a consensus with regards to what we value. The mistake of realists and small-minded MAGA types is in assuming that morality can or should be separated from considerations of power politics. This is ironically enough the true philosophy of the bugman, or, in many cases, those who prefer totalitarian societies but don’t have the courage to admit it.