Why the War in Ukraine May Not Deter China
U.S. strategists hope that Russia’s failures and the strong response from the West will give Beijing second thoughts about attacking Taiwan. But Xi Jinping could be drawing different lessons.
China’s military and civilian leaders have watched with dismay over the past 15 months as Moscow’s anticipated blitzkrieg in Ukraine turned into a drawn-out slog marked by a series of Russian defeats. China last fought a war in 1979—a campaign against Vietnam that ended in a humbling draw—and used to admire Russia for its ability to translate violence into political gains. No more. “Russia’s military image and credibility have crumbled,” said Zhou Bo, a recently retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who serves as a senior fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “This has become a war they did not expect.”
The strategic question preoccupying the U.S. and its allies today is what effect these Russian setbacks will have on Beijing’s own aspirations to absorb Taiwan, an island democracy that China considers part of its territory. Will China be deterred by Russia’s failures in Ukraine and the surprisingly strong Western reaction to the invasion? Or will it draw very different lessons, learning from Russia’s tactical mistakes while hoping to benefit from the eventual exhaustion of Western military resources?
The answer is of vital importance to the U.S. Unlike the bloodshed in Ukraine, a military confrontation over Taiwan, should it erupt, is likely to involve the U.S. directly. If deterrence fails, this would be America’s first war in generations against a near-peer adversary, likely resulting in staggering losses. Taiwan also plays a much more central role in the global economy, with a GDP nearly four times the size of Ukraine’s and a near-monopoly on manufacturing advanced semiconductors that are indispensable for modern technologies.
As China’s navy and air force intensify war drills around Taiwan, Chinese officials hold their cards close to the chest. They insist that the events in Ukraine will have no bearing on their own decisions when it comes to Taiwan. They bristle at what they call American attempts to “Ukrainize” the Taiwan issue.
“Of course the war in Ukraine should stop as soon as possible, but whatever happens there should not hinder our reunification efforts,” said Cui Tiankai, a former Chinese ambassador to Washington and deputy foreign minister who remains influential in Beijing’s establishment. “For us in China, national reunification is the goal, whatever international environment we might have.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping has set a 2027 deadline for making the PLA ready to invade Taiwan, according to U.S. officials.
The Ukrainian war has focused minds in Beijing on the inherent unpredictability of a military conflict.
Western officials and China-watchers agree that the Ukrainian war has focused minds in Beijing on the inherent unpredictability of a military conflict. Despite a string of recent successes in places like Syria and Georgia, Russia’s battle-tested professional military failed to take Kyiv last year and has since been expelled from more than half of the Ukrainian land it originally occupied. Russia has sustained more than 100,000 casualties in the past six months alone, according to U.S. estimates.
Despite the PLA’s modernization and sophisticated new equipment, nobody knows how it would perform on the battlefield, given that none of its current soldiers have combat experience. By highlighting the unforeseen risks of any invasion, Russia’s troubles in Ukraine have likely bought precious time for Taiwan and its supporters, while also providing more room for deterrence.
“The lesson for China is that the war in Ukraine has massively increased strategic ambiguity about what could happen if they were so foolish as to launch a military takeover of Taiwan,” said former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was a key Western advocate of military assistance to Kyiv. “I don’t think anybody really expected the U.S. or the U.K. and many, many other countries to support Ukraine in quite the decisive, practical way that we did.”
Though Taiwan is Beijing’s key objective, the Chinese Communist Party’s overriding priority remains the survival of its rule, according to Valerie Niquet, head of the Asia department at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a Paris think tank that advises the French government, among others. “The road to that survival doesn’t pass through a collapse of the Chinese economy, an eventual military defeat and a humiliation should they fail to take possession of Taiwan,” she said.
Current U.S. and allied officials say that the experience of Ukraine has punctured the narrative, embraced by Moscow and Beijing alike, of impotent, decadent Western democracies in inexorable decline. The Europeans, in particular, have turned out to be surprisingly willing to impose serious economic sanctions, severing dependence on Russian energy in order to back the Ukrainian resistance.
Yet it’s too early to think that the fundamental takeaway for Beijing is that it shouldn’t invade Taiwan, many U.S. and allied officials caution. The war in Ukraine is far from over, and a Russian defeat there isn’t a foregone conclusion. Despite a slew of Western sanctions, the Russian economy hasn’t collapsed, and President Vladimir Putin’s regime hasn’t faced serious internal challenges even as Russian combat losses have soared. When it comes to Western unity, China and Russia still likely believe that sooner or later the united front on Ukraine will collapse, perhaps after the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
“The situation is difficult for Russia, but Russia still has more manpower, military strength and overall national strength to support this war,” said Zhou. “President Putin cannot afford to lose this war, because how can he explain why all these people have died? He needs to justify this. On the other side, how can the Western support be sustained if the war becomes protracted?”
In many ways, the future of Western unity over Ukraine has become intertwined with the challenge of defending Taiwan. The prevailing view in the Biden administration and among NATO allies is that an inability to prevent Russian success in Ukraine would have the direct effect of emboldening Beijing. “If China sees that we are not willing to stick together to help Ukraine, where Russia is so clearly and obviously recognized as the aggressor, then I think China will not be really impressed with anything we say about Taiwan,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
Others, particularly in the Republican Party, say that the flow of weapons to Ukraine should be curtailed because it has already significantly weakened U.S. military muscle in Asia. Though the military needs of Ukraine and Taiwan are different, given the huge role that ships and planes would play in any war over the island, there is still substantial overlap, particularly in scarce air defenses. A war in Taiwan would also require large amounts of artillery ammunition, which is being quickly consumed in Ukraine.
“The argument that China is going to be deterred fundamentally by what happens in Ukraine is highly exaggerated,” said Elbridge Colby, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Marathon Initiative think tank, who served in a senior Pentagon role in the Trump administration. “China’s decision on whether to attack is primarily going to be determined by China’s assessment of the regional military balance. And the war in Ukraine depletes weapons stocks that cannot be easily replenished.”
‘It’s pretty clear that Taiwan would be a second front in the same war as the one that’s under way in Ukraine.’
— Matt Pottinger, former U.S. deputy national-security adviser
Such arguments, according to Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national-security adviser in the Trump White House, overlook the growing cooperation between Russia and China, whose leaders announced a “no limits” partnership shortly before the invasion of Ukraine. “It’s pretty clear that Taiwan would be a second front in the same war as the one that’s under way in Ukraine,” he said. “We should not kid ourselves that by leaving Europe on its own we will somehow strengthen deterrence in the Western Pacific.”
Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the U.S. supplies weapons to Taiwan, the only nation to do so on a significant scale. Taiwan is purchasing hundreds of Harpoon anti-ship missiles to counter a potential Chinese amphibious assault and is considering other major military upgrades. Authorities are still deciding, however, whether to shift to a so-called “porcupine strategy,” which would use widely dispersed weapons such as anti-ship, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to repel a land invasion. Taiwan’s current policy gives priority to expensive ships and jets that can respond to China’s ongoing air and naval probes, well short of war, near the island. Such large platforms would likely be destroyed in the first hours of a full-scale conflict.
Though President Biden has repeatedly said that Washington would intervene should China invade Taiwan, there is no binding U.S. commitment to do so, in contrast to an attack on a NATO ally.
According to a wargame carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies this year, the U.S. would lose many thousands of troops, between 200 and 484 aircraft, and between 8 and 17 ships, likely including aircraft carriers, in the first weeks of the conflict, depending on different scenarios. China’s economy and military would also be devastated, much of Taiwan would lie in ruins, and Japan—which would almost certainly be dragged into the war—could also suffer serious damage. In most of these exercises, China ultimately suffers defeat, though not when Taiwan is left to fend for itself.
“If war breaks out, everyone who participates is a loser—China, Taiwan, the U.S., Japan—because they will see massive attrition on both sides,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a participant in the wargame. “My biggest takeaway is that we have to get creative about deterring China from invading Taiwan in the first place, which involves inducing sufficient uncertainty about success and/or consequences in Xi’s mind.”
Given the historic similarities in Chinese and Russian military equipment and doctrine, down to rank insignia, it’s no surprise that Chinese commanders are carefully analyzing the war in Ukraine. One likely strategic conclusion, some senior Western officials say, is that Russia doomed itself by invading with too small a force, expecting a surrender rather than a determined fight. China’s military lesson, they warn, is that Beijing would need to go after Taiwan with a massive shock-and-awe strike, mounting a far larger force and possibly leveraging the nuclear threat from the get-go.
On a more tactical level, according to Zhou, the lesson drawn by the PLA from Russia’s misfortunes in Ukraine is to have better and more secure communications, more precision-guided missiles and more drones—items that China already possesses in quantities well exceeding Russia’s prewar stocks. Chinese military officials say that Beijing has carried out deep military reforms, learning from events like the 1991 Gulf War—changes that have made its armed forces very different from Russia’s.
‘If the Russians screwed up, it doesn’t mean that the Chinese leadership believes that it will also screw up.’
— Alexander Gabuev, director, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center
“If the Russians screwed up, it doesn’t mean that the Chinese leadership believes that it will also screw up,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and one of the leading Russian experts on China. “They may think that Putin is an idiot, that the Russians have hollowed out their army by graft and that the Russians lack motivation, whereas China is fine when it comes to motivation and may think: ‘We have built up the army instead of pilfering it away, and everything will work out for us.’”
Though the predicaments of Ukraine and Taiwan are different in many respects, a common thread is that the fates of the two democracies are central to the national narrative of their much bigger authoritarian neighbors. Putin denies the very existence of Ukrainians as a people separate from Russians and has presented the return of Moscow’s control over the country as the keystone of his legacy, a way to repair the historic injustice of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He decided to launch a full-scale invasion only after efforts to subdue Ukraine through fostering pro-Russian parties and pro-Russian proxy forces failed.
For Xi, who has already snuffed out the autonomy of Hong Kong, achieving control over Taiwan would be the biggest prize of his campaign for China’s “national rejuvenation,” washing away the dishonor suffered at the hands of foreign imperialism. Colonized by Japan in the 19th century, Taiwan has developed its distinct identity in part because since then it has only been ruled briefly by the mainland, in 1945-49.
Mirroring Russia’s rhetoric about Ukraine, China insists that the majority of the Taiwanese are really on its side.
Mirroring Russia’s rhetoric dismissing Ukraine’s elected government as an illegitimate “Kyiv junta” and presenting itself as a liberator, China insists that the majority of the Taiwanese are really on its side. “If we use military force to resolve the Taiwan issue, we would target the extreme minority of Taiwanese independence elements and foreign forces that interfere, and not the people of Taiwan,” said PLA Lt. Gen. He Lei.
Like other Chinese officials, Gen. He scoffed at any comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan, pointing out that no major nation grants diplomatic recognition to Taiwan’s authorities. “It’s like comparing the beauty of a person with the beauty of a pig. Ukraine is a sovereign country, while Taiwan is an unalienable part of China’s sacred territory,” he said. “Conflicts between two countries must be resolved through peaceful negotiations.”
To many Taiwanese, the parallels with Ukraine are crystal clear. While fears of a Chinese invasion have been present ever since the Communist Party seized China’s mainland in 1949, last year’s Russian invasion drove home that the unthinkable can actually happen, sometimes with frightening speed.
“I hope that Xi has learned the good lesson from Ukraine: If you invade and try to bully a neighboring country, you are going to fail and the whole world will stand together more than you can imagine,” said Wang Ting-Yu, a senior member of the Taiwanese parliament’s defense committee. “But if Xi Jinping has learned the lesson that he wouldn’t make the strategic and tactical mistakes like Putin, that Putin is stupid but Xi Jinping is smart, the lesson of how to win a war instead of how to not have a war—then the Ukrainian lesson may become a tragedy for China.”
Yaroslav Trofimov is The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent.
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Appeared in the June 17, 2023, print edition as 'Why the War in Ukraine May Not Deter China China Sees Taiwan And Ukraine as Very Different Cases'.