When Joe Biden vowed last month to intervene militarily if China ever attacked Taiwan, his comments drew a sharp response from Beijing.
"If the US continues to go down this path, it will have to pay an unbearable price," said a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
That sentence was widely interpreted as a warning of war. On the same day, China and Russia conducted a joint exercise of nuclear bombers near Japan.
It was another in a series of combative exchanges between the US and China, as well as a reflection of growing fears in Washington, Taipei and among US allies that Beijing could try to annex Taiwan in the next few years.
"This is a decade of concern, especially the period between now and 2027," says Phil Davidson, a retired admiral who until last year commanded US forces in the Indo-Pacific.
"I assess this because of the stunning improvements in China's military capabilities, the political timeline for Xi Jinping and the long-term economic challenges in China's future."
While Russia's invasion of Ukraine has focused attention on the potential threat to Taiwan, there is one major difference between the two situations: China's war on Taiwan could be a war with the US
Although China's threat to seize Taiwan by force has existed since the Chinese Nationalist government and military fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war on the mainland, Beijing has long focused on bringing the island under its wing through economic incentives and political pressure.
However, many Taiwanese policymakers now believe that with the Communist Party losing hope that these measures will ever bear fruit and its armed forces rapidly modernizing, Xi may soon decide to go to war.
Taiwan came back into focus as an increasingly dangerous hot spot just days after Biden's inauguration last year when Chinese warplanes simulated missile attacks on a US aircraft carrier sailing near the country. Over the following months, China then increased the pace and volume of fighter and bomber flights near Taiwan.
Davidson warned of the danger in March last year, when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he believed the threat of a Chinese attack on Taiwan "will play out ... in the next six years." Shortly after, a senior US official told the Financial Times that Xi was flirting with taking control.
Since then, such warnings have become more widespread — a backdrop to Biden's comments about responding to the Chinese invasion. It also precipitated a shift in communication between Taiwan and the US on how to defend the island.
Although Washington has been urging Taiwan to take the risk more seriously for years, the Taiwanese government and military have been slow to react. But the war in Ukraine served as a wake-up call. Senior Taiwanese officials say the Russian attack underscored the threat they face.
"The danger comes from Xi Jinping and the fact that he will start a third term later this year," says one official. "Under China's previous process, where they would have a new leader every 10 years, their 'historic mission' of reunifying Taiwan could be transferred to the next leader. But when the national mission becomes the mission of one man, the danger grows”.
"Putin would not have made such a decision to invade Ukraine if he had not decided everything himself. So even Xi Jinping could make that kind of misjudgment," adds the official.
A clearer US position
While Russia's invasion of Ukraine has focused attention on the potential threat to Taiwan, there is one major difference between the two situations: China's war on Taiwan could be a war with the US.
When Washington transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, it replaced the Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty with the Taiwan Relations Act. That law requires the US to provide the country with the weapons it needs to defend itself and for the US itself to maintain the capacity to resist force or coercion that would threaten Taiwan's security.
The US has in the past been ambiguous about how far that commitment would go. In an attempt to dissuade Beijing from considering military force and discourage Taipei from formalizing its independence, Washington has refused to say whether it would get involved in a war between the two.
Biden seems to have drastically reduced that ambivalence. Asked by reporters during a recent visit to Japan whether he was prepared to use force to defend Taiwan, he said: “Yes. That is the commitment we have taken." The White House was quick to emphasize — as it did after Biden's previous similar statements that some analysts saw as gaffes — that U.S. policy toward Taiwan had not changed.
But senior officials in Taiwan and U.S. allies believe Biden is trying to deter Beijing by signaling more clearly that he may have to fight the U.S. as well. "We think Biden made a political decision to show that this option cannot be ruled out," said a senior Taiwanese official.
“In the case of Ukraine, he said in advance that the US would not go to war. "But when China feels that its military capability has reached a level ready to take Taiwan, the use of financial or economic sanctions alone will not create an effective deterrent," he says. "So China absolutely must not be allowed to believe that you will not take military action."
While there is growing concern about a possible invasion, the timeframe for any military action - and China's real intentions - remains intensely debated.
The year Davidson sees as a potential timeline for a Chinese attack - 2027 - marks the centenary of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). In November 2020, the Chinese Communist Party said it wanted to "ensure that the 100-year goal of military construction is achieved by 2027", called for faster military modernization and reiterated the goal of equipping China's military for networked, "intelligent" warfare.
While there is growing concern over a possible invasion, the timing of any military action and China's real intentions remain intensely debated
Although these are phrases China has used before, the Pentagon calls 2027 “a new turning point. "If realized, the PLA's 2027 modernization goals could provide Beijing with more credible military options in Taiwan contingencies," it said in an annual report on China's military last year.
Some analysts doubt Davidson's date. But a year after his testimony, government and military officials in Taipei and Washington say the period between now and 2027 is a real threat.
Last October, Taiwan's Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said the PLA would have "full capacity" to attack Taiwan by 2025. "The current situation is really the most dangerous I have seen in my more than 40 years in the military," he told lawmakers.
Avril Haynes, the US director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that the threat to Taiwan is "acute" between now and 2030 - lending credence to Davidson's sense of urgency. John Aquilino, head of the Indo-Pacific Command, recently told the FT that the invasion of Ukraine highlighted that China's threat to Taiwan is not abstract.
Taiwanese experts see 2024 and 2025 as a particularly dangerous period. They believe Xi could be tempted to use force if the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which insists on preserving Taiwan's de facto independence, wins again in the next presidential election in early 2024, or if he senses a political vacuum in the US after the next presidential election in late 2024.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, says there are two camps when it comes to the timing of a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan.
"Some believe in the Davidson framework - the time of maximum danger - and others believe that we have time to build a capability that will deter and defeat China at some future time," Eaglen says. She adds that Pentagon leadership acknowledges that there is some concern right now, while emphasizing the medium term.
A person familiar with the administration's assessment of the threat to Taiwan said there was general agreement that China intended to develop the necessary attack capabilities by 2027, but argued that was very different from a question of intent or action.
“I don't think (China) has made a decision to do anything in any time frame other than having certain capabilities. I think that gets lost in the discussion of the date or the time frame,” she says.
Preparing for the worst
Growing concerns about a possible Chinese invasion are changing the way Washington and Taipei think about the country's defense.
For more than a decade, Washington has been trying to convince Taiwan to "harden up" to defend against a Chinese invasion. But that country's military continued to plan under the assumption that it had more time to prepare or that it might not have to deal with an all-out invasion.
Many Taiwanese military experts see that as a worst-case scenario, but worry that Chinese military moves such as Beijing's frequent air and naval exercises near Taiwan, information warfare or perhaps even a naval blockade could undermine the country's resolve to resist. Taipei therefore wants to also retain the military capabilities needed to counter such moves, such as warships, modern fighters and early warning aircraft.
But now that the US is increasingly focused on the near-term threat of an invasion, it is putting pressure on Taipei: the administration has begun rejecting Taiwan's requests for major weapons such as anti-submarine helicopters, which it believes could be quickly destroyed in a Chinese attack and waste too many valuable resources.
Instead, the US is pushing for an increased focus on small, relatively cheap and resilient weapons such as mobile missiles, which would only be useful in a counterattack against China's attempted invasion and occupation.
The Taiwanese government was encouraged to take action by the additional perspective provided by the war in Ukraine.
Senior officials say President Tsai Ing-wen's government is now laser-focused on making the country more resilient to resist a Chinese attack. Prime Minister Su Tseng-chang has promised to support the extension of basic military service from the current four months to a year, as well as an increase in the military budget, which has so far averaged only two percent of GDP.
"We're really in the middle of a big and thorough discussion right now, both among ourselves and with the Americans, about the things we need to do," said one person familiar with the situation. "We are exploring a number of radically different ideas on how to make our country resilient, to build the capacities we need in war."
Policies under consideration include faster and more decisive reform of Taiwan's undertrained reserve forces; building distributed energy and communications systems that Chinese cyber and missile attacks could not knock down; strengthening the command and control system; planning of stockpiles of essential goods in times of war; and assigning administrative responsibilities for civil defense. That senior official says: "Our goal is to be ready between 2025 and 2027."
Chinese modernization
There is ample evidence from publicly available sources that the PLA is working decisively on the capabilities needed to launch an invasion.
One is to find and target submarines that could attack Chinese naval ships carrying invasion troops across the strait. Of the 1.543 aircraft deployed by the PLA to Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) as of September 2020, 262, the second largest group, were anti-submarine warfare aircraft. ADIZ is a buffer zone in international airspace that is observed for early warning purposes.
In April 2021, the PLA Navy's first Type 075 helicopter carrier, a large amphibious assault ship capable of carrying helicopters and troops, was commissioned. Two more have already started the trial phase.
The force is still far from the necessary transportation capacity, but plans to use civilian ferries, barges and floating platforms to bring troops ashore even without access to a port, according to researchers at the PLA's Military Transportation University.
Based on reports on China's state-run military channel and satellite photos, Michael Dahm, a retired US Navy intelligence officer and researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, analyzed two related exercises in the summer of 2020 and 2021. He believes the PLA is developing plans to mobilize maritime transport "on a large scale".
"Such a mobilization of civilian transport to support cross-strait operations could pose a very high risk and could entail heavy losses," he wrote in a document last year. "But there are some challenges related to effectiveness and attrition that the Chinese military cannot simply solve by sheer mass and tolerating losses."
Some analysts believe that an invasion of Taiwan will remain a significant challenge for the PLA for years to come, and that this fact has been underscored by Russia's problems in a war operation under much less complex circumstances.
“What the PLA wants to achieve in its ultimate scenario is far more complicated than what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine. What Russia is trying to do is the easiest, and what China would be trying to do is the most difficult in terms of invasion scenarios in general," said Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at MIT and an expert on Chinese military strategy. "Therefore, looking at the difficulties Russia faces in conducting relatively simple operations, Chinese leaders may be wondering whether the PLA is capable of conducting much more complex operations, and may be more cautious about launching such an attack for now."
Su Cu-jun of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is supported by Taiwan's defense ministry, says that no matter what steps the PLA takes, it still has to send ships through the strait. "In Russia, we saw vehicles stuck on the highway. In the Taiwanese scenario, the sea is your highway,” says Su. "So this is the time and place to destroy them".
However, while China's capacity to mount an invasion remains unclear, the rapid modernization of China's armed forces has put its potential enemies at a disadvantage.
"China is on the path of investment. If the US continues the status quo in its approach to defense investment, the gap between the two will be such that the timeline will accelerate,” says Davidson.
That imbalance could make the situation even more dangerous. A Taiwanese military official says US plans to strengthen its position in the Indo-Pacific, such as building a more mobile Marine Corps force and putting Chinese ships at risk with missiles on islands controlled by allies, will take several years. "We are concerned that the Chinese Communists may think it is better to attack early, before we and the US are ready."
Some analysts argue that watching Russia struggle in Ukraine may also signal to Beijing the importance of acting quickly. "Politically, if China's leaders believe that the US will provide unconditional security guarantees to Taiwan, they will be much more willing than before to take some kind of military action to show their resolve and will to resist the US," says Fravel.
Some Taiwanese politicians believe that the growing rivalry between the US and China increases the risk. Eric Chu, chairman of the opposition Kuomintang party, recently told an audience in Washington that he hoped US attention would not cause "trouble" in Asia. "I appreciate any kind of help from the US," Chu said. "But we hope that the tension will decrease in the coming years".
Translated and edited by: A. Šofranac
Bonus video:
