The Risk of War in the Taiwan Strait Is High—and Getting Higher
Beijing’s Worry About the Future Could Spur a Deadly Miscalculation Soon
Bonny Lin, John Culver, and Brian Hart
May 15, 2025
Tensions in the Taiwan Strait are growing. Even before Taiwan
elected William Lai as its president, in January 2024, China voiced
strong opposition to him, calling him a “separatist” and an “instigator
of war.” In recent months,
Beijing has ramped up its broadsides: in mid-March, the spokesperson
for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office labeled Lai a “destroyer of
cross-Straits peace” and accused him of pushing Taiwan toward “the
perilous brink of war.” Two weeks later, as Beijing launched
a large-scale military exercise around Taiwan, the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) circulated cartoon images that portrayed Lai as an insect.
One image depicted a pair of chopsticks picking the “parasite” Lai out
of a burning Taiwan.
This effort to dehumanize Lai reflects Beijing’s deep anxiety about
the trajectory of cross-strait relations, particularly what China views
as Lai’s desire to push Taiwan toward independence. Compared with his
predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen,
Lai has taken a stronger and more defiant stance in the face of growing
Chinese threats to the island, as evident in his rhetoric and new
policy measures. This March, Lai characterized Beijing as a “hostile
foreign force” and announced a plan to implement
17 wide-ranging strategies to defend the island from Chinese
infiltration.
China’s vilification of Lai echoes Beijing’s denunciations, roughly
two decades ago, of Chen Shui-bian, then president of Taiwan. Beijing
labeled Chen a “die-hard separatist” and “a troublemaker” who “is riding
near the edge of the
cliff, and there is no sign that he is going to rein in his horse.”
Beijing escalated external pressure against Chen and worked with
opposition parties within Taiwan to frustrate his political agenda.
China did come dangerously close to using military force
against the island in 2008 and might have gone through with it if Chen
had been more successful in winning Taiwan’s public support for his
referendum.
Beijing’s attitude now should very much concern Washington. China
does not view Lai’s rule as merely a continuation of that of Tsai.
Instead, Beijing sees Lai as a disruptor like Chen and is treating him
much in the same way. Since
Lai became president, Beijing has demonstrated growing willingness to
use military might to intimidate and punish the island. And it is far
more prepared to use force against Taiwan today than it was 20 years
ago.
Apparent divisions within U.S. President Donald Trump’s
administration about how to approach Taiwan compound these risks. If
Beijing doubts U.S. commitments to the island, that could encourage
China to engage in more coercive actions
against Taiwan. All these factors dramatically increase the chances
that Beijing will miscalculate—and that it could very well use force
against the island around 2027, as China approaches critical military
modernization milestones and Taiwan gears up for
its next presidential election.
ESCALATION SPIRAL
China’s official narratives have long emphasized that its peaceful
unification with Taiwan is inevitable. But in recent months, anxiety has
mounted in Beijing that Lai intends to systematically decouple Taiwan
from China. Chinese
media outlets have accused Lai of militarizing Taiwanese society as Lai
prioritized efforts to increase Taiwan’s defensive resilience,
reinstated the military court system to handle espionage and treason by
Taiwan military officials, and accelerated training
and preparations for the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Beijing is highly critical of Lai’s efforts to thwart Chinese
infiltration and to counter Chinese cognitive warfare, arguing that Lai
is preventing the resumption of tourism, suppressing
and prosecuting pro-Chinese groups and individuals, discouraging
Taiwanese citizens from applying for Chinese identification documents,
imposing barriers on academic collaboration between universities in
China and Taiwan, and altering Taiwan’s textbooks to
undermine historical and cultural affinity.
In March, a Chinese government spokesperson claimed that Lai’s 17
strategies were aimed at “obstructing exchanges and cooperation across
the Taiwan Strait.” China has also denounced Lai’s efforts to encourage
Taiwanese businesses
to invest more in democratic countries, including in the United States.
Beijing has cast these measures as doomed to fail and mocked Taipei
when the United States threatened to impose high tariffs on the island
in April.
Many Chinese analysts believe that Lai’s political position is weak
compared with that of his predecessor, Tsai. But they worry that this
weakness may make Lai bolder, as he might want to ramp up confrontation
with China to try to
win public support.
Based on this analysis of Lai and domestic conditions in Taiwan,
hawkish voices within China are urging an ever more aggressive approach
toward Taiwan. Some are calling for the use of military force against
the island or the resurrection
of so-called civil war operations, nonpeaceful ways for Beijing to
unify with the island, such as by imposing a maritime blockade of the
island. Other hawks have publicly wondered whether Beijing can engineer a
crisis in Taipei similar to the 1936 Xian incident,
in which generals serving under Chiang Kai-shek—who was leading the
government of the Republic of China and its Nationalist forces—seized
Chiang and forced him to ally with the Chinese Communist Party to fight
against Japanese forces that had invaded northern
China.
A more resonant parallel may be to one of the most dangerous
periods during Chen’s tenure. To boost turnout in Taiwan’s March 2008
presidential election, Chen paired that vote with a popular referendum
on whether the island should
join the United Nations under the name Taiwan instead of the Republic
of China.
This proposal came perilously close to crossing a redline for
Beijing: in 2005, Beijing had passed the Anti-Secession Law, which
established China’s right to use military force against Taiwan under
several conditions, including if
“major incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China should occur.”
When the law was passed, a spokesperson for the Chinese government
suggested that an island-wide referendum could be considered a major
incident. And in 2007, after Chen proposed the referendum,
Chinese President Hu Jintao warned U.S. President George W. Bush that
Beijing interpreted the Taiwan referendum in this way.
Beijing accompanied these warnings with significant military
signaling. China increased its deployment of short-range ballistic
missiles aimed at Taiwan sevenfold from the beginning of Chen’s term in
2000 to early 2008. Before the
referendum, the Bush administration detected that the PLA had put
mobile short-range missile units near the Taiwan Strait on heightened
alert. The U.S. military and intelligence community believed that China
could fire missiles around Taiwan, as it had during
the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis—or, worse, China could actually attack
the island.
Fortunately, the 2008 crisis passed without bloodshed. Low voter
turnout invalidated Chen’s referendum, and the opposition Kuomintang
candidate beat the candidate from Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party in
the presidential race.
U.S. deployment of significant forces near Taiwan may also have given
Beijing pause. Taking the risk of escalation seriously, Washington had
publicly opposed Chen’s referendum and positioned two aircraft carriers
to the northeast and southeast of Taiwan, and
a third near Singapore, ahead of the vote. Nevertheless, the episode
suggested that Beijing was serious about using force if provoked by what
it viewed as “pro-independence” activities.
BAD OMENS
Since the 2008 crisis, China’s military capabilities have grown
significantly. Its army, navy, and air force have rapidly modernized,
and its conventional rocket forces now field a far more capable array of
longer-range missiles,
including advanced hypersonic and antiship ballistic missiles. China
has also doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal over the past five
years. Beyond advances in hard capabilities, Chinese President Xi
Jinping has launched sweeping organizational reforms
to enable the PLA to conduct more joint high-tech operations, and he
has waged unparalleled anticorruption campaigns to root out obstacles to
military readiness.
Beijing’s willingness to use its military is growing, too. China
has long engaged in military exercises to hone its capabilities and
intimidate Taiwan. During Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s tenure from
2008 to 2016, Beijing limited
these provocations as it sought to encourage greater cross-Strait
engagement. But China resumed major exercises when Tsai, who emphasized
Taiwan’s sovereignty and security, succeeded Ma. In August 2022, toward
the end of Tsai’s term, China mounted larger and
more provocative drills near Taiwan than it had ever held before.
Now the pace and scale of Chinese military activities are
increasing. Not even a year into Lai’s term, China has broken precedent
by staging three large-scale exercises, which were given names to raise
their profile and distinguish
them from smaller drills.
In a significant shift, the PLA is now using such large-scale
military exercises to punish Lai’s administration for domestic political
acts. All of China’s past major exercises—in 1995–96, 2022, and
2023—were launched after Taiwan’s
leaders traveled to the United States or met with senior U.S.
officials. Last December, China did engage in a major—but unnamed—drill
after Lai made stops in Hawaii and Guam on a tour of the Pacific. But
all three recent large-scale exercises responded to
domestic speeches or statements by Lai.
These military activities have become markedly more provocative,
unpredictable, and complex. In April’s exercise, named Strait
Thunder-2025A, PLA naval vessels reportedly ventured within 24 nautical
miles of the island’s shores.
China is engaging in large-scale operations around Taiwan year round
and increasing activities to the east of Taiwan. In a break with the
past, the PLA now provides little or no advance warning of its drills.
This has raised concerns in Washington and Taipei
about how much lead time the United States and Taiwan might have should
China decide to use force to seize the island.
In another shift from earlier years, recent rounds of exercises
have witnessed China’s coast guard joining with the navy to practice
blockading Taiwan. China’s maritime militia, a state-backed network of
civilian vessels often deployed
to assert Chinese territorial claims, has also become increasingly
involved. The participation of these new actors suggests that China is
preparing to conduct a broad variety of operations, such as an invasion,
a PLA navy–led blockade, and a Chinese coast
guard–led quarantine of Taiwan.
Finally, China is also operating across a bigger geographic range:
its exercise in December involved one of the largest-ever deployments of
maritime forces from all three of the PLA’s coastal commands. China
conducted operations
around Taiwan and in the East China and South China Seas, demonstrating
its ability to dominate areas within the first island chain—an arc of
islands and countries in the Western Pacific stretching from Japan to
parts of Indonesia—and block external forces
from entering to assist Taiwan.
Apart from such major operations, China now conducts near-daily
military incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, a
self-declared area that extends beyond the island’s official airspace.
In 2024, the Chinese military
flew a record-shattering 3,075 sorties into this zone, an increase of
over 80 percent from 2023. These operations aim to delegitimize Taiwan’s
claims to its surrounding air and seas and complicate Taiwan’s ability
to monitor and track activities around the
island.
Some of these air incursions occur as part of “joint combat
readiness patrols,” involving not just air assets but also coordinated
maritime operations. These patrols are now occurring on a near-weekly
basis and offer China opportunities
to quickly step up coercion against Taiwan short of much larger-scale
exercises. Days after Lai unveiled his 17 strategies in March, for
instance, China launched two joint combat readiness patrols and then
followed up two weeks later by holding its Strait
Thunder-2025A exercise.
WILD CARD
U.S. officials are issuing warnings about these remarkable Chinese
military activities. In February, Samuel Paparo, the head of the U.S.
military’s Indo-Pacific Command, asserted that China’s “aggressive
maneuvers around Taiwan right
now are not exercises. . . .They are rehearsals.”
Yet as China increases its military activities against Taiwan, many
in Beijing don’t know where Washington stands. Beijing is relatively
confident that the Trump administration wants to intensify competition
with China, with a particular
focus on the economic relationship. Chinese analysts also generally
believe that Trump will try to use Taiwan as a card in this competition,
but there is no consensus on how he will do so.
Chinese experts assess that Trump and his team are divided on
Taiwan. Many believe that Trump wants to negotiate deals with China and
that he and many of his supporters want to avoid foreign military
entanglements. But national security
hawks in the administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio,
are still focused on checking Chinese aggression and influence. Chinese
interlocutors note that Trump’s national security team is not receptive
to Chinese concerns about Lai, and they worry
that when it comes to day-to-day Taiwan policy, this administration
will likely strengthen relations with Taipei through deepened
cooperation and increased arms sales.
These conflicting assessments leave Beijing less certain that the
United States will defend Taiwan from large-scale attacks or
lower-intensity scenarios. But Chinese officials believe that, if left
unchecked, the United States is
likely to move even closer to Taiwan. That creates a dynamic ripe for
miscalculation. China could determine that it needs to treat Taiwan more
aggressively to make it clear to Trump’s national security team that it
will tolerate neither growing U.S.-Taiwan
ties nor moves by Taiwan that it sees as provocative. Meanwhile,
China’s perception that Trump is not altogether willing to defend Taiwan
may lead Beijing to consider still more escalatory actions against the
island.
COURSE CORRECTION
U.S. and allied policymakers must not overlook these shifts in
China’s perceptions of Taiwan and its actions regarding the island. As
Lai’s term continues, Beijing and Taipei are likely to enter an even
more dangerous situation.
Chinese experts believe that Lai may take more radical measures to
promote Taiwan’s independence in 2027 ahead of the next presidential
elections. If Lai is not faring well in the polls, Chinese analysts
worry that he could ratchet up his anti-Beijing stance
to win electoral support, much as Chen did in 2008. Xi himself has set a
deadline of 2027 for the PLA to have the capability to forcefully take
Taiwan. Given Xi’s push to accelerate the PLA’s modernization, it is
unlikely that his military leaders will tell
him in 2027 that China is not capable of successfully executing
large-scale military operations against Taiwan, meaning that Xi may feel
more confident then—and willing to provoke a crisis or conflict.
Beijing’s diminished patience and hardened intent make it even more
important for the Trump administration to ensure that China clearly
understands the resolve of the United States and its willingness to
counter Chinese aggression.
There is extraordinary work that the United States must do to deter a
conflict or, failing that, to deny and defeat Chinese military
adventurism. In addition to building up its own military capabilities—as
well as those of Taiwan and its allies—and significantly
increasing allied and partner defense spending, Washington must better
integrate different elements of U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan to
enhance deterrence and reduce the risks of misperception by potential
adversaries.
This is important because Beijing is not just assessing American
resolve by looking at what the United States is doing on defense. For
example, as Chinese experts watch the U.S.-Chinese tariff and trade
negotiations, some are noting
how rapidly Washington has both scaled up and temporarily backed down
on tariffs, suggesting that Trump was bluffing initially and that the
administration now recognizes that it needs to cooperate with China
despite its focus on competition.
As the United States is moving fast on multiple fronts, it will be
important to pay attention to how Beijing may be connecting the dots of
different U.S. policies in cobbling together a larger understanding of
American strategy and
intentions. To the extent that China is misunderstanding the United
States, it will be crucial for the Trump administration to correct and
push back against Chinese narratives, both in public and in private.
If the Trump administration does not want a crisis on its hands, it
should not leave such a door open for Beijing. The Taiwan Strait will
be volatile enough over the next few years without adding to the mix
muddled Chinese perceptions of what the United
States is willing—or not willing—not do.