Xi Jinping’s Plan for Taiwan
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China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system. I'm Jude Blanchett, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, and this week I'm joined by Karis Templeman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the manager of the Hoover Institution's Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific region. Today we'll be discussing Beijing's Taiwan strategy.

Kars, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on, Jude.

issues. You're actually one of the few bona fide Taiwan experts, someone who has done their graduate studies on domestic Taiwan, on their political system. So it's a pleasure to have you on. How did you first get interested in Taiwan? So I was in college in the 1990s, and China looked to be the next big thing. And so I took a course on Chinese politics, loved the course, decided I wanted to go to China, and therefore needed to study Chinese. And I

I wanted to apply for a Boren Fellowship, you know, the National Security Education Program. And to make myself more competitive, I thought at the time, well, I should go see both sides of the street. And so I did my first term in Beijing and my second term in Taipei. When I got to Beijing, it was my first time in Asia, and I just didn't enjoy it. I actually didn't.

pretty much hated Beijing. It was polluted. It was crowded. It was just a tough city to adapt to at the time. And then when I went to Taipei, everything that I hated about the Beijing experience was much better. It was 2001. Taiwan had just elected their first non-KMT president. I was in the regular student dormitory with Taiwanese students speaking Chinese every day. And so I fell in love with the place very quickly. And so ever since then, I've had kind of this

schizophrenia and my approach to Asia, where I like to frame myself as a China scholar, but my heart is really kind of on Taiwan issues. And if you're focused on Taiwan domestic politics, the comparison set is not really mainland China, it's other third wave democracies. And so when I did my dissertation research, it had nothing to do with mainland China, actually. It was on Taiwan's transition to democracy and how that stacked up against a bunch of the other countries that had gone through a similar process at about the same time.

One question about Taiwan, and then I want to spend the bulk of these on how Beijing thinks about Taiwan. You follow Taiwan domestic politics very closely. We've just had a pretty important presidential election in Taiwan with President Lai Ching-dao being inaugurated on May 20th.

What is your expectation for the main priorities of President Lai? And in light of the divided legislative UN and what is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily divided and partisan domestic political environment, what do you think Lai is going to be able to accomplish given those constraints? So I think Lai's first priority is to win re-election in four years. I was struck when I was in Taiwan on election night that

In talking to people from the DPP, they were not in a particularly celebratory mood at that point, even though they'd won an unprecedented third term for their party, because they had lost the legislature and Lai had won with 40% of the vote, only because the opposition split. And so...

Several people said the working assumption in the DPP camp was that Lai would struggle to win re-election in four years, and he would have to work pretty hard to build a new DPP majority coalition if he wanted to do that. And so I took away from that the assumption that Lai was not going to pursue particularly radical policies in the cross-strait relationship, that he would look to be a

fairly moderate figure and that he would try to find ways to work with parts of the opposition in the legislature. If not the KMT, then at least the TPP. And so his election night victory speech, actually, I thought reflected those concerns pretty well. I was a bit more surprised by his inauguration speech where he really kind of turned the page on Tsai Ing-wen's approach to cross-strait relations. He

use different language to describe the two sides of the straits than Beijing certainly would have preferred, but also from what Tsai Ing-wen had used in her past inauguration speeches. And I think probably unnecessarily created some headaches for himself in the cross-strait relationship. And so...

I think the jury is still out on what Lai is going to do over the next few months and years and the cross-strait relationship. But domestically, he's really boxed in. He's looking to be a pragmatic coalition builder, I think, to address some of the fundamental concerns that really eroded support for the DPP in the last election. You mentioned election night, January 20th, and then Lai's May 20th speech. Two sets of reactions from Beijing to both of those. The first is,

I think there was a expectation that the lie electoral victory in and of itself would

would provoke some sort of reaction from Beijing, or Beijing would use that as a quote-unquote provocation. There were rumors floating around that they would fully walk away from ECFA, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, which is a set of preferential tariffs. We might see some military exercises, not at the level that we saw when then-Speaker Pelosi visited, but what we would euphemistically call sort of Pelosi-minus

And we didn't really see any, I mean, there was a peeling off of one diplomatic ally, but it was compared to what I think the expectations were relatively muted. And then after the May 20th speech, which I had been getting signals from some of the mainland Taiwan scholars in the weeks leading up to that, that safe money was on, there was going to be, again, a relatively muted response. That

that Beijing would adopt a wait and see approach to some of the early actions of a future president lie. But of course, we saw three days after the joint sword 2024, a military exercises, which were pretty significant, didn't include live fire missiles, but some new actions by the Coast Guard, some encirclement of some of the outer islands. What do those two sets of responses tell you as early signals about how Beijing is thinking about a lie administration? The

reaction to Lai's election was muted. I actually wasn't surprised by that. I thought Lai gave a very

kind of milquetoast, anodyne election night victory speech. He didn't say anything that Beijing especially wanted to hear. He didn't say anything that Beijing was really upset about either. There wasn't any kind of provocative language that they could point to as problematic. More than that, though, I think the election result from Beijing's perspective was a trend in the right direction. They really have this almost pathological distaste for the DPP and anybody who's associated with that party.

The DPP didn't do that well. They, I think as well as us, could see that the polls were suggesting Lai would win. The fact that he was down 17% in the vote from where Tsai Ing-wen was four years ago was...

from their perspective, a win. The KMT is now the largest party in the legislature, not the DPP. They can live with anybody who's not DPP these days in Taiwan. They at least are willing to talk to parties who are not the DPP. I think from their perspective, that was a decent outcome, and they were willing to see where things went after the election. The much more robust response to Lai's inauguration speech, I think,

Here, I disagree with a fair number of other Taiwan watchers. I think that was conditional on what Lai said in his speech. I don't think Beijing had planned to do a giant demonstration no matter what. I think they were in a wait and see mode. They had planned these activities, but they weren't going to follow through with them unless Lai said something that surprised and alarmed them.

His language in his inauguration speech, I thought, was a bit sloppy. He referred to the other side of the strait as China, repeatedly. And Tsai Ing-wen never did that in her inauguration speech. She would always talk about the two sides of the strait, so as to preserve at least some semblance of a one China possibility. I'll just tell you an anecdote. I actually...

distributed Lai's inauguration speech in the course I was teaching at the time on Taiwan security issues. And I had a fair number of students in the class who could read Chinese. And I hadn't primed them to think about this speech in one way or another. I made them read through it and then give me their initial reactions. And just about everybody was like, Beijing is going to be really upset by what Lai said in this speech and the way he framed the cross-strait relationship. So

From my perspective, I think whether he intended to or not took a harder line or used language that was likely to get Beijing riled up, and he didn't have to use that language. At the extreme, if he'd given basically Tsai Ing-wen's 2016 speech verbatim again, I think Beijing would have actually been quite pleased with that and would have reacted much differently than they did.

I now want to ask a series of questions just to tease out how you think about some of the big framework issues around this really complicated issue. But just as a threshold one, what's wrong with a newly elected leader of Taiwan articulating what I think for most people is the observable reality, which is, although its diplomatic status is contested, I should say, by the United States, who does not diplomatically recognize Taiwan,

The functional reality is Taiwan has all the hallmarks of a sovereign, independent country. If you were a Martian and you came down, they have a self-governing capability. They have their own military. They issue their own currency. They do have diplomatic relations with a handful of countries. There is this thing next door that is China. And in vernacular, we all refer to one as Taiwan and one as China. So just as a threshold question, what is the...

problem with speaking realistically about the situation we're faced with. And also, as an adjunct, if you're President Lai, you've seen a careful calibrated approach by your predecessor that has not bent the trajectory in a fundamentally

positive direction for Taiwan. The walls have sort of continued to close in. Beijing's sort of slow strangulation continues. So what's wrong with trying something new? Yeah, it's a great question. I think fundamentally for Beijing, it's the cross-strait

dilemma or problem, as they like to refer to it, is about sovereignty. And this goes back to 1949, when there was a new republic set up on the mainland, the People's Republic of China. And from October 1st, 1949 until the present, that regime has

asserted in the international system that they are the rightful government of all of China, and they alone should receive all of the benefits that come with international legal sovereignty. And the Taiwan side, the Republic of China, should not. And initially, almost the entire world did not accept their position. But over the last 70 years,

just about everyone, including the United States, has made that switch to Beijing over Taipei. And so from Beijing's perspective, the cross-strait dilemma is first and foremost about recognizing Beijing's unquestioned sovereignty over all of China. And so when a leader of Taiwan does not acknowledge

Either that Beijing has sovereignty over Taiwan, which is, I think, a bridge too far for any Taiwan leader, or that Taiwan is at least part of a larger divided country, then that, from Beijing's perspective, is unacceptable. It's kind of an expression through rhetoric in public speeches that Beijing is most sensitive to.

As a consequence, there's lots of other reasons we often hear why Beijing would want to control Taiwan, why they care a lot about this issue. I don't think the fact that there's a semiconductor industry on Taiwan has a whole lot to do with Beijing's prioritization of Taiwan. I don't think...

Frankly, the fact that Taiwan is a democracy has a whole lot to do with Beijing's obsession with the Taiwan sovereignty issue. I think it goes back to this fundamental assertion starting from 1949 that the People's Republic of China is the legitimate government and the ROC needs to disappear and Taiwan needs to be brought back into the fold as both regimes asserted that it would be for much of the Cold War.

Why is it problematic that Lai is speaking in a way that would appear to align with reality to most of us external observers? I get it, Beijing will be upset. But I guess the argument is, as you stated, 70 years ago, no one accepted China's position. Now, almost every single country represented at the United Nations does. And Beijing seems to be in control of the tempo and now the physical geography and space around Taiwan. So at some point,

isn't trying something new merited. And I'm sure President Lai looks out and says, look, we've been trying this careful calibrated approach. It ain't working. So now it's time to be a bit bolder. Yeah. So I've kind of given the PRC perspective on this. Now let me criticize their approach. I think their approach to Tsai had a kind of fundamental flaw at the core of it, which is from their perspective, Tsai Ing-wen's

She did not just undermine the status quo, she actually moved things in the wrong direction. She didn't accept what her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou accepted was the state of cross-strait relations in his rhetoric. And so from that perspective, they needed to punish Tsai because she was backsliding. She was moving in a pro-Taiwan independence direction in her rhetoric.

The problem with that is that the DPP, the party she represented, had never committed anything close to what Ma Ying-jeou expressed was the state of cross-strait relations. In fact, Tsai Ing-wen actually brought her party much closer to Ma's position than any DPP leader had ever done before. She didn't go all of the way to where Ma was, but she went about 80% of the way to where Ma was. Beijing's response was,

You didn't repeat the 92 consensus that Ma Ying-jeou repeated, and therefore you have backslid, and therefore we must punish you for that. And the problem with that is Tsai couldn't go any further, or she would have provoked a revolt within her own party on her first day in office. And Beijing did not or refused to just kind of see that political reality. And they also...

who now just don't have any credibility with Lai when they say, "Don't say X, Y, and Z or else we'll punish you." And Lai says, "Well, if I don't say X, Y, and Z, you punish the last person anyway."

So there's no kind of reassurance on Beijing's side that will not be punished if he does, in their view, the right thing. And so I do think there's a lot to be said. Lai has just kind of given up on the idea that they can somehow placate Beijing's demands in his rhetoric about cross-strait relations. Yeah, I mean, it strikes me the challenge for Taipei is really about managing the downward steepness of the curve.

And I think that's probably the situation confronting Lai is Tai tried her best, but the slope of the curve was still negative. And so it's worth trying something different. Again, TBD about exactly what a more stark approach yields in terms of strategic gains to Taiwan, but I can at least understand the rationale. Kars, let me zoom out a bit. And I want to now focus on Beijing's approach to cross-strait relations. But I'd like to focus really on the last

10 to 15 years coinciding with Xi Jinping's rise to power. When you look back at the past decade or so,

How much of cross-strait strategy and policy under Xi Jinping feels consistent across previous administrations, whether that's Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, or back even further? And what are the areas that you think Xi Jinping has taken a different approach, whether that's directionally or in terms of intensity?

Yeah. I actually think there's a huge amount of continuity that most American observers don't appreciate in Beijing's approach to Taiwan. I would trace it back to Hu Jintao in about 2005, where

In the wake of Chen Shijian's reelection, which really surprised Beijing, they decided to pursue a fundamentally different strategy towards Taiwan. They decided to accept the fact that Taiwan was a democracy, that you had to place your hopes on the Taiwan people, that you had to try to influence Taiwan public opinion. The best way to do that was with positive inducements rather than threats.

But at the same time, they decided that they needed to have a more credible, more conspicuous stick to go along with the carrot of positive inducements. And so they passed the anti-secession law. They developed new military capabilities to threaten Taiwan if it moved towards independence. And they leaned more on Washington, D.C. to try to constrain the Taiwan side.

I actually see a lot of continuity from 2005 onward, where the strategy has had two components. There's a soft track where they're focused on trying to shift Taiwan public opinion in a pro-unification direction by appealing to shared culture, shared heritage. And there's a kind of material appeal as well, but especially during the 2010s,

The PRC's economy is growing at double-digit rates. Taiwan is in a kind of economic slowdown from what they're previously accustomed to. And so Ma Ying-jeou initially was actually quite persuasive with the majority of Taiwanese and saying, we should hitch our wagon to the PRC growth engine across the strait and be carried along. We don't have to give up our sovereignty, our democracy, our freedom of speech. We can

still benefit immensely from the PRC's rapid growth. Initially, at least, the PRC made a lot of headway in their Taiwan policy by working with Ma to demonstrate that was actually true. On the hard side, Beijing has continued to build out. This, again, often is underappreciated in the US. They've, since the mid-1990s, been building out the military capacity not only to

punish Taiwan to threaten military strikes on the island if Taiwan moves towards independence, but also potentially to prevent US intervention in the case of the Taiwan contingency. That was a plan and a mission that was put in place in the late 1990s after the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. The investment going into the military has increased every year, but it's kept pace more or less with China's

GDP growth. So they're not devoting a larger and larger share of economic resources to military modernization. And it's now 25 years later that they have really the capabilities that they set out to build so many years ago. That has given them now some options that they really did not have in the last Taiwan Strait crisis.

I see this as really a lot of kind of long-term continuity. What's different is with the election in Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 of another DPP president, Beijing felt that they were in a better position to kind of take a hard line and demand things of Tsai that they didn't.

couldn't or weren't able to demand of Chen Shui-bian. And they thought they would probably be with a more powerful military, a larger economy. They would have the ability to coerce her in ways that they couldn't coerce Chen Shui-bian. And I think they probably have been unpleasantly surprised by the kind of negative ramifications of ramping up coercion against them.

on U.S. views especially, but also views of U.S. partners and allies towards their approach to Taiwan over the last few years. What's your sense of how capable Beijing is at course correcting? How nimble is its Taiwan policy? I think you were just talking about some of the shortcomings of their approach. And I think we've tended to see Beijing's strategy, certainly under Xi Jinping, as

relatively unyielding and unbending. And even when it's failing, they double down on the failure. I think, of course, about other areas how China's behavior is galvanizing increases in defense spending in Japan. It's galvanizing bandwagoning with the United States through agreements like AUKUS, the rejuvenation of the Quad, et cetera. That doesn't seem to filter up into Xi Jinping's consciousness such that he

makes any significant tack. Can you think of examples in cross-strait policy where Beijing has shifted either because of perceived success or failure? I think they've been tactically pretty flexible. So their willingness to engage, for instance, with Ko Wen-je, former mayor of Taipei, even though he had come into power as a

basically supported by the DPP, expressing positions on cross-strait issues that were in line with the DPP's approach. Once he became mayor, Beijing was actually willing to engage in a kind of, I think it was the University Olympiads. They actually sent a bunch of athletes over after Kowenja said that both sides of the strait are part of the same family. And so they were willing to

basically reward someone that they didn't fully trust in after he said, in their view, something that was helpful or consistent with their own views of the cross-strait relationship. And so they've actually, I think, shown a fair amount of flexibility in engaging with other visiting groups that go to the mainland and rolling out

new policies that are intended to appeal to the Taishan, so the Taiwanese business people on the mainland. So within the kind of soft track, they're looking for opportunities and they're able to move fairly quickly to follow through with this larger strategic imperative. But on the strategic side, the kind of

the fundamental approach, I was really surprised in 2020 that they didn't reevaluate a little bit because Tsai Ing-wen got reelected with 57% of the vote. She won over 8 million votes. She just smashed the previous record for votes in a presidential election. Beijing had put

a fair amount of resources and effort. It's hard to tell how much, but a fair amount into supporting the KMT candidate, Han Kuo-yu, in that campaign. Han Kuo-yu looked for a brief moment like he might actually win that election, and then the Hong Kong protests happened and Han's popularity just slumped dramatically.

And as a result, Tsai and the DPP were riding really high after the 2020 election. And the KMT was defeated and demoralized and divided and didn't look like they had much of a future. And I thought Beijing might actually reassess what they're doing right now. And at a minimum, maybe send out some feelers to Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP and try to establish some back channels of communication, maybe demonstrate some...

make some gestures of goodwill or something. And instead, they just doubled down. They just kept on with the strategy that in my mind appeared to be failing. And so I think they've shown a lot less willingness to reassess when events in Taiwan suggested their strategy.

is backfiring or fundamentally not working. And you see this as well in their engagement with the US on Taiwan issues too. We have really ramped up our open support for Taiwan's military reforms, arms sales have really jumped over the last 10 years. And Beijing's approach to

uh that issue really hasn't changed at all they're still kind of registering protests but i would note i hope this isn't too much off off track but i would note the things that beijing really gets riled up about and does giant military demonstrations against are entirely symbolic and rhetorical so nancy pelosi's visit to taiwan was a much bigger deal to beijing than the fact that we sold them f-16s can i just double down on that point because i i think

Why 1995-96? Because we had Li Dengwei... We issued a visa to Li Dengwei to come to Cornell and give a speech. Right. There was like a snafu over some weapons sales in 1992, but it was relatively restrained. But if we think about the big moments that we have had of military exercises, 1995-96 was about a trip from Li Dengwei to the United States. I'm not justifying... We're not justifying Beijing's response. I think it gets to a core point,

which is, so 95-96 Li Donghui, August 2022, Nancy Pelosi, May 20th, Beijing's interpretation of Lai's speech. We haven't had military exercises after particular packages of weapons sales, right? We haven't had these when there's news coming out about the US soft community on Taiwan. And I'll just say, what to me it indicates is,

You can do a lot in the defense cooperation space, but you counteract that when there are political actions. They can often zero out, make the space harder to do some of the more substantive stuff. Right. And those political actions are of a very specific kind. They touch on...

the U.S. one China policy and on Taiwan's claim to independent sovereignty. Beijing's just over the top reaction to Pelosi's visits to Taiwan. They justified as Pelosi is third in line to the presidency. She's from the same party as Joe Biden. She is an official representative of the United States government, in effect.

And she's also the highest level U.S. official to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich back in the 90s. Gingrich even wasn't as bad because he was from the opposition party and he and Bill Clinton didn't see eye to eye on anything. And so

they, in their kind of convoluted thinking about the sovereignty issue, a visit by the leading member of Congress to Taiwan is, it's a violation of the US's one China policy that they just absolutely cannot tolerate and need to demonstrate that and impose costs on the US side for engaging in those kinds of activities. Yeah. Let me ask you another question, Karis, that

comes up quite a bit, and that's thinking about timelines or time horizons that Beijing is operating off of. Obviously, one of the main pillars of the discussion for the past several years has been the 2027 time period. This isn't made up whole cloth, of course. 2027 represents the 100th anniversary of the PLA. And according to CIA Director Bill Burns, it's

that this is a year when Xi Jinping has tasked the PLA to be ready to fight and seize Taiwan. So there's legitimate reason for thinking about this, but how do you and your parsing of Beijing's strategy think about the issues of timelines? Do you think they're operating off of fixed timelines? Are these simply benchmarks for ensuring that the PLA is moving forward rather than horizontal or backwards? If they're not operating off of a timeline,

How is Xi Jinping thinking about when and under what context he might consider the use of military force to solve this issue? Great question. I'll say flat out, I don't think there is a 2027 deadline for Xi Jinping to resolve the Taiwan issue. We don't have any evidence that he has that deadline either yet.

you know, in his public statements or in his private comments of which we're aware. And so there's kind of a game of telephone here in the China Watcher community where requests are the goal of having the PLA ready and having the capabilities and the training necessary for

to give Xi Jinping the option of going after Taiwan by 2027. That appears to be a real thing, but it's a benchmark. It's something that the PLA needs to shoot for, to strive for. And it's a pretty ambitious goal as well. And it's intended to make them kind of stretch, I think, in order to meet that goal. I think there's a...

classic inference fallacy here where you look at what the PLA is doing to develop their capabilities and then you assume intentions as a result of the capabilities that are being developed. That's not a valid assumption.

Xi Jinping, as far as we know, has no kind of clear timeline for when Taiwan must return to the mainland. As you've written about, there's some vague language about Taiwan being part of the process of national rejuvenation. That process needs to happen by the centennial of the PRC's founding in 2049. That's still quite a ways away. Even that is kind of a soft deadline. It's not clear yet.

what unification in Beijing's terms could look like or mean. And the fact that Taiwan now only has 12 other states in the international system that actually formally recognize the Republic of China rather than the People's Republic of China, that could be an indicator. That number is down by half over the last 15 years. That could be an indicator that

Taiwan already is just, it's not recognizing the interstate system. And so our claim to it has gotten stronger and stronger. There are ways that Beijing could spin this as we're moving towards unification. We don't need to launch a military invasion as long as trends continue in the right direction. Let's flip the coin though, Karis, and ask,

What are the subjective or objective benchmarks for Beijing on deterioration or backward movement? John Culver and others have talked about Xi making determinations on the use of force not based on artificial timelines, but based on conditions. What are some of the conditions you think that would provoke a conversation in Beijing about really that now is the time for some worst case measures?

Yeah. So I think they've been very consistent in saying that a move towards a de jure declaration of independence by the Taiwan leadership would be intolerable and would potentially necessitate, in their terms, a military response. When people say a de jure move towards independence, what does that specifically mean?

So from Beijing's perspective, it's things like changing the official name of the country, which right now is still the Republic of China. Changing the national flag to get rid of the traditional ROC flag. Changing the constitution in a way that redefines the national boundaries to include only Taiwan, maybe the islands of Jinmen and Mazu and Penghu.

All of those touch on fundamental sovereignty questions and de jure assert that Taiwan is not part of China. So anything along those lines, I think Beijing would view as an unacceptable change to the status quo and a move towards de jure independence. The other piece here that's really important for Beijing is international recognition. So right now, Taiwan does not have that from most of the world.

If there's some step by the United States or any other major partner or ally, upgrade the level of diplomatic interaction with the Taiwan side. Upgrading the status of Taiwan's

TICRO office in Taipei or in Washington, D.C., for instance, allowing them to call that the Taiwan office or even the Taiwan embassy, referring to the Taiwan representative as an ambassador. All of that would look like a move towards a formal recognition of Taiwan as a state with all the rights and privileges that come along with that every other state in the interstate system enjoys.

Those two things, a movement in Taiwan that touches on Taiwan's relationship with mainland China and Taiwan's kind of status in the interstate system. And if there's movement towards a kind of formal recognition and an elevation of Taiwan's rights and privileges in the interstate system, those two things would look a lot like a de jure recognition of independence.

Related to that, Karis, that's sort of a formal matter. Then there is the sort of more subjective elements about when Taiwan has functionally become de facto independent to such a degree that the prospect of quote unquote reunification no longer is in play. I don't have the anti-secession law in front of me, but there is language in the Section 8 clauses that would trigger a quote non-peaceful reunification.

response, you know, a euphemism for military use of military force. There is one clause in there that is essentially more or less that the prospect of peaceful reunification is no longer tenable.

Now, of course, they don't define exactly how you would know that process towards unification is no longer feasible, but I could imagine it would be... Could it be things like looking at public opinion on Taiwan? If we get to a point where, let's say, the DPP has now won its 18th consecutive presidential election and 100% of the population says that it supports moving towards immediate independence now, without... All joking aside...

How do you assess that subjective element as incorporated in that language in the anti-secession law? Yeah. So the best answer I have to this comes from conversations I've had with PRC scholars who focus on the Taiwan issue. And perhaps the most revealing anecdote I can offer here is I've observed in a lot of these conversations that

The Taiwan people have freely elected a DPP president. And if you want them not to do that, you have to offer them something that discourages them from, you have to offer them something better, basically. And the offer on the table is not very appealing to the majority of Taiwanese. And the response of just about every PRC scholar to that is, well, the DPP has brainwashed the Taiwan people.

They are not acting of their own free volition. They have not been taught in the right way. They don't understand that they're Chinese. It's actually not a matter of public opinion, kind of reflect a natural kind of secular drift away from

mainland China and support for unification, it's that the DPP is leading them in the wrong direction. And the people need to be reeducated and led in the right direction. And the irony here is that they don't see these shifts in public opinion as kind of reflecting something that is just fabricated

fatal to their desire for peaceful unification or something that they really bear any responsibility for. It is, in fact, reversible. If you had the right party come to power in Taiwan, public opinion would swing right back. If the Taiwanese people are educated that the territory of the country includes Mount Everest and the Yellow River and the capital of the country, at least

The Republic of China, the traditional teaching is that it's Nanjing, not Taipei. And if all of those things continue, then public opinion is where it should be in Taiwan. And so to kind of take your extreme example, if they see a DPP leader that doesn't care at all about Beijing's reactions to the rhetoric that they use to describe the cross-strait relationship is moving towards a fundamental overhaul of

say, history textbooks and cultural teachings and is doubling down on the idea that Taiwan is its own independent entity with its own unique history and culture that has very few, if any, links to mainland China at all, then if that happens over a period of years or even decades, then I can see that eventually, you know, if someone wanted to in Beijing, justify that as a provocation that cannot go ignored. Karthik, final question.

Cluster of questions I want to ask you is about what euphemistically we call sort of left of invasion scenarios. So I think it's easy to understand some of these scenarios under which the PLA may, the leadership in Beijing might make a determination to

that needs to now use military force to compel the annexation of Taiwan, whether that's because of they come to the conclusion that there is no pathway to peaceful, quote unquote, peaceful unification, or because of some other proximate event. I think something of a debate in Washington about how we should think about gray zone and how much prominence it should get in our defense planning. And I think if I can be fair to the argument, it's something like

Even if Beijing is considering some of these left of invasion scenarios, whether this is a quarantine, probably quarantine more so than a blockade. At some point, either these quarantine scenarios are unsustainable and would very easily escalate into an actual conflict. And also these gray zone scenarios,

aren't likely to get Beijing to the end zone, either because the more these gray zone scenarios occur, the more that it's just galvanizing public opinion on Taiwan away from Beijing. And so inevitably, we're going to end up with the process of conflict. And also, the more time we spend thinking about gray zone scenarios, that's almost a distraction from admittedly lower probability, but the much more high impact scenario. And so let's stop. Gray zone is important, yes, but really the focus should be on

preparing Taiwan and preparing the United States for high-end kinetic scenarios. Where do you come down on that argument and why?

Yeah, great question. I think the gray zone activity is important. It is a potentially fundamental threat to Taiwan's long-term survival. It's important to realize that there are two targets of gray zone activities. One is the Taiwanese people themselves. These activities are intended to increase a sense of vulnerability or helplessness among the Taiwanese public and ultimately a sense of fatalism.

and potentially as a corollary, support for negotiations with Beijing. If you don't want these activities to happen on a surprising or random basis, there's stuff popping up all the time that you can't predict beforehand. If you want to avoid that uncertainty, especially if you have business interests in the cross-strait relationship,

Let's find ways to placate Beijing. If they will dial back the Grey Zone activities, let's give them some concessions so they'll do that because they hurt business or they hurt the stability of the relationship or they hurt our confidence. But there's a second target that I think is underappreciated in the US, which is actually the United States ourselves. And from Beijing's perspective,

If the U.S. isn't involved in this conflict at all, if we definitively wash our hands of any sort of commitment to protect Taiwan or to maintain the sea lanes and airspace around Taiwan free of PRC coercion, then it's a very different and much easier problem for Beijing. And the first effort to create a sense of fatalism in Taiwan, I think, probably results in

You can imagine a scenario, at least, where a Taiwan leader without US backing of any kind feels they're compelled to negotiate and to agree to some kind of deal, the best deal they can get, that basically produces Hong Kong 2.0. And I think Beijing's ideal situation

The way in which this conflict across the strait ends is a negotiated settlement. The US is completely out of the picture, and they get somebody in Taipei who's willing to offer to sign up to some kind of commonwealth or one country, two systems model, something that definitively ends any remaining claim that Taiwan has to being separate from the PRC.

The problem for them is the US right now is clearly has interest at stake in Taiwan, has been committed since June 1950, really, to preventing the use of military force to resolve the Taiwan issue. But the problem for Taiwan is in the long run, the United States, there are some isolationist tendencies in American public opinion. We've had a past president and potentially a future president who's indicated that the

US partners and allies around the world are not necessarily... Those alliances are not necessarily to the benefit of the United States. You can name him, Karis. He's not... Donald Trump. I'll say it. Donald Trump. And Trump is in some ways sweet, generous. But what I worry about is in the long run, public opinion in the US is such that it's not just Trump, for instance, who's criticizing support for Ukraine right now. And it's not just...

We've also got criticism of support for Israel, which is a longtime U.S. partner, coming from the left in the United States. And so there are some tendencies where especially the younger generations of Americans are asking hard questions about what the U.S. gets for having a robust, muscular military presence around them.

My greatest fear is that Beijing uses gray zone activities to kind of probe the limits of a U.S. commitment to Taiwan and to other partners and allies in the region. And an American president sees that and says, this is really going to cost me in Nebraska or wherever in the heartland. If I commit American forces to what could escalate into a full blown conflict with China, I'm not willing to do that. I don't see fundamental U.S. interests at stake here.

Let's pull back. And in fact, to use Trumpian language, let's cut a deal with China. We can walk away from Taiwan if they'll buy more soybeans or something like that. Right. So being a bit facetious here, but I think there are signs in the kind of state of American politics right now that.

We're not just automatically going to be there for Taiwan. And Beijing then has an incentive to try to drive a wedge between the United States and partners and allies in the region and lean into this sense of fatalism in Taiwan, that the U.S. is an unreliable partner and potentially is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

And just to put a fine point on it, and you and I were discussing this before we started recording, perceived credibility by Beijing is a crucial variable here. And the United States could have all of the right force posture and weapon systems and stockpiles pre-positioned.

But if Beijing thinks that whoever is in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue doesn't have the stomach to commit those forces, then the sort of military deterrence piece alone is insufficient. I agree with you on the gray zone. It certainly shouldn't come at the expense of thinking about high-end kinetic scenarios. And of course, our Department of Defense should primarily be thinking about fighting and winning wars. But my sense is that

the more space Beijing has in the gray zone and to salami slice, A, that actually functionally shapes the space around Taiwan, right? And if Beijing is just able to run ad infinitum successive rounds of military exercises where it is functionally erasing things like the median line, it's now doing new things with the Coast Guard, it's almost getting training runs every single time on joint exercises, right?

That actually just reshapes the space on which a possible war would be fought. But second, I think it's a hard sell for us to say we're going to be pretty restrained on the gray zone, in part because we can't really figure out a through line to thwart the salami slicing. But trust us, when it gets much more costly and riskly, we're definitely going to intervene with all we've got.

At least that's my sense of how and where the gray zone matters. Another way to think about this is if your credibility is your will times your capabilities, most of the people worried about a Taiwan contingency in the US right now are focused on the capability side of things. We don't have enough ships. We don't have enough ammo. We don't have enough capabilities in the region to definitively defeat Taiwan.

a PRC invasion attempt. If we are given the order to do that, we're not comfortable we actually can pull that mission off. My concern is much more about the will side of this. If we throw everything we've got at the Taiwan problem,

I actually think we probably can dissuade Beijing from even starting a conflict. The problem is not our capabilities. It's that Beijing doesn't believe we're actually going to throw everything we've got at this island 90 miles off the coast of mainland China. That is an important interest of the United States, but it's not a critical interest. It's not something that we would potentially escalate to a nuclear war over. And so it is...

That gap between what we are capable of doing and what we are willing to do for Taiwan that Beijing is looking to exploit here. I would just put a pin and say that last comment you made is actually probably a point of substantive debate as well. There are some who see it as a fundamental linchpin in U.S. strategy and defense strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And in that sense, it is critical.

One of the many reasons Beijing hasn't invaded so far is because they suspect that some degree of U.S. intervention is possible, right? So they don't think we're a paper tiger despite what they say. But I think your point still is taken that I think the will issue is not a set and forget. I think we need to be consistently making the case. I will just say as a

analytic point for how much we in Washington talk about the prospect of potential conflict over Taiwan. I'm surprised by the lack of public conversation we're having about this. And again, to your will equation, I would think it would increase the credibility of U.S. military deterrence if

And this is across any administration, not Republican or Democrat. I'm not attacking either, but was willing to publicly make the case to the American people about how and why peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is a vital interest for the United States. But we haven't. And so, again, going back to a previous comment, even if we were making substantial, important investments in our defensive capabilities, if those aren't matched with

that the will factor, if Beijing doesn't have complete confidence that will factor is ironclad, it seems that we're only solving for half the equation. Important as it is, of course, to think about our defense industrial base and

That is absolutely vital, but it's necessary and not sufficient. So I agree with you on that. Anything I didn't ask you in this general, I mean, I realized we could keep going for hours, but any final benedictions? Let me just suggest a policy recommendation here. If the will part of the equation is what's being underemphasized right now, how do we get more Americans to care about Taiwan, to think about it as an important U.S. interest, and at least to understand Taiwan

the potential prospect of the U.S. president putting Americans in harm's way to defend it. Well, you know, more students studying and signing the 21st Century Trade Partnership, signing the freaking double taxation agreement that's been in Congress for far too long now and actually getting that passed, deepening our own economic integration with Taiwan, all of these things

actually are practical things that are realistic to do with the Taiwan side, that I think would increase the credibility of our will. And Beijing can see that, Taiwan can see that, and we can see that. And so I think that the conversation about the non-military aspects of the problem is actually, it needs to be elevated a bit. These other pieces really are critical in the long run to maintaining deterrence across the Taiwan Strait.

Great point and productive suggestion of Karis. Thank you so much for your time. And as always, your insights, I always learn a lot from listening to you think through these issues. You have such a careful balance, but morally clear way of thinking about this. So just continue to appreciate your insights. It's been a pleasure, Gene. Thanks very much for having me on.

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