Beijing’s Worry About the Future Could Spur a Deadly Miscalculation Soon
The article was published by Foreign Affairs on May 15, 2025. The authors are Bonny Lin, John Culver, and Brian Hart.
BONNY LIN is Director of the China Power Project and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
JOHN CULVER is a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. He served for 35 years as a Central Intelligence Agency officer, including as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018.
BRIAN HART is Deputy Director and Fellow of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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.
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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.
The pace and scale of Chinese military activities are increasing.
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.
Washington must ensure that China clearly understands the resolve of the United States.
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.
