Is Time on China's Side? Beijing's Taiwan Calculus and the Balance of Power

**Ryan Evans** (0:11)
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I'm fascinated by this idea of whether countries think time is on their side and what that then means.
Throughout history, states have made some of their most consequential decisions based not simply on the balance of power, but on their perception of where that balance is headed. If leaders believe tomorrow will be better than today, they can afford patience. But if they believe tomorrow will be worse, then the temptation to act today can become overwhelming. And this brings us, of course, to Taiwan. One of the most important questions in international politics today is not simply whether China wants to take Taiwan. They, of course, do. They describe this as wanting to reunify with Taiwan, even though Taiwan has never been a part of China. It's whether Chinese leaders believe the future is making that objective easier or harder to achieve. To help me sort through these questions, I was pleased to welcome three friends onto the show, Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao.
Dean is one of Washington's longest serving interpreters of Chinese military power. He's a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute and a former Heritage Foundation expert. Mira Rapp-Hooper is one of the leading architects and analysts of US strategy in the Indo-Pacific. She's a former senior director for East Asia and Oceania at the National Security Council under the Biden administration and is now a Brookings Institution fellow. Amanda Hsiao is a China specialist who's worked for many years in Beijing, Taipei, Singapore, and of course, Washington. She advises on Chinese foreign policy, Taiwan, and the risks of conflict in the Indo-Pacific as a director in the Eurasia Group's China practice. And it is an article that she wrote with Bonnie Glaser that prompted me to start thinking about these questions in more depth. Hope you enjoy the episode.
What made you and Bonnie argue that Beijing thinks it has time on its side as far as Taiwan is concerned?

**Amanda Hsiao** (2:24)
Well, it really felt like the conversation was really shifting again towards this question of, are we facing a strategic window of opportunity, essentially, for Beijing to make a move on Taiwan as a result of President Trump's ambivalent, let's say, approach to cross-reissues. We felt like that question was coming up again.
We were hearing it not only in a piece written in Foreign Affairs, but also in conversations around the Iran War, that perhaps because of a distracted US, that Beijing would see this as a ripe opportunity to make a go at Taiwan.

**Ryan Evans** (3:10)
Militarily.

**Amanda Hsiao** (3:11)
Militarily, that's right.

**Ryan Evans** (3:12)
You don't think that's how China sees it?

**Amanda Hsiao** (3:14)
Our argument in this article that I co-authored with Bonnie Glazer is essentially that in the near term, there is little risk of a military invasion of Taiwan. And basically, we argue that it's because China increasingly believes that its long-term strategy of bringing Taiwan into the fold is working. So there's a couple of pieces to that. One is that we argue that the Chinese would prefer to take Taiwan at lowest possible cost. So this is not to say that they are not fixated on unification. They very much are. But they want to do it at lowest possible cost and minimal harm to their other major national objectives. And we assess that they see the cost of a military invasion now as prohibitive.
But there's another piece to that. We also think that Beijing believes that unification could become easier and less costly over time.
And that is predicated on a belief that the balance of power is increasingly tilting to China's favor and that as China accrues increasing military strength, economic capabilities, that it will eventually be able to dissuade both the US and Taiwan from basically putting up much of a fight.

**Ryan Evans** (4:42)
Before I invite the other guests to agree or disagree with that, what strikes me about this is when we think about China thinks this and Beijing thinks that, there's obviously different institutional actors all under the umbrella of the party. There's the PLA and what it might think, but that's been purged recently. But what really matters is what Xi Jinping thinks. And that is, so there's this element of we have to try to read this guy's mind or at least understand his worldview and how he thinks. And then surmises to how he might view this, but that's also, there's limits to that approach.