TAIPEI, Taiwan — China will try to establish military control of the Taiwan Strait before the 2024 elections in Taiwan and the United States, according to a senior Taiwanese official.
“After the 20th Party Congress, we believe that the CCP will attempt to alter the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council deputy minister, Chui Chui-Cheng, said Wednesday through an official interpreter. “For example, they would try to unify with Taiwan. The tactics that they would use include gray zone tactics, and they would try to create conflicts and therefore establish the new normal.”
Chui’s prediction raised the curtain on the message that the head of his agency will carry to Washington, D.C., next week amid a frenzy of military activity in the Taiwan Strait that has unfolded in the weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited the island democracy. Chui’s team suspects that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping will launch the relevant operations in the months after the party congress in October, which is expected to rubber-stamp a third term for the Chinese Communist Party chief.
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“A presidential election might not necessarily impact the national defense capabilities of our countries, but we’re making important decisions, [so] we might face some challenges and difficulties, and Beijing might see this as an opportunity to launch certain actions,” Chui told reporters. “We have always been preparing for the worst-case scenario. And I would like to urge the global democracies to remain united and stand together with Taiwan in the face of Chinese expansion.”
Chui offered those remarks to a group of international journalists invited to Taipei for briefings focused largely on Taiwan’s desire to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement linking 11 economies across the Pacific Rim and the Americas. Taiwanese officials regard membership in the pact as an economic and geopolitical prize, while China is working to ensure that the trans-Pacific bloc does not admit Taiwan.
“We understand the difficulties [that] countries face, but I would like to stress that Taiwan’s strategic position is extremely important; to maintain Taiwan’s strategic position is to maintain the benefits of your own country,” Chui said, adding that membership in the trade bloc “will allow Taiwan to establish greater status in the international community and to also contribute to the world.”
Chui suggested in parallel that Xi, expected to secure another term, will feel pressure to make substantial progress toward the goal of bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control over the next five years.
“By 2027, he will be seeking his fourth term, and Chinese people will expect to see his achievements regarding his Taiwan policy,” Chui said. “So he might not be able to achieve reunification with Taiwan, but Chinese people would expect to see certain results within this period of time. Therefore, in the next five years, we will see that China might attempt to undermine the status quo of the Taiwan Straits and therefore generating great risks in the region.”
Those political calculations align with a warning from Adm. Philip Davidson, then the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who identified “the period between now and 2026” as a time frame in which “Beijing could — could — likely choose to forcibly change the status quo.” Within that so-called Davidson Window, Chui pointed to the months between March 2023 and the end of the 2024 election season as an intermediate window in which Beijing “will enhance its A2AD capabilities” — a reference to the anti-access area denial weapons designed to thwart maritime operations like the recent transit of the strait by a pair of U.S. Navy warships.
“We need China to be aware that if it were to implement further military actions or other gray zone tactics, it will have to pay the price,” he said. “It might also threaten the stability of its regime. And third, the international community will put more pressure on China if it were to take action.”
Chinese officials have asserted in recent months that the Taiwan Strait is an “internal” waterway within China’s sovereign territory, even though the CCP has never ruled in Taipei. And Chui argued that Xi’s willingness to risk a conflict might increase due to groupthink within his tightly controlled regime, even if a sober analysis would suggest that Beijing’s military is not prepared for such a struggle.
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“Now that they are implementing the … Xi Jinping thought, there are fewer people making decisions, therefore generating greater risks,” he said. “Therefore, the CCP regime is becoming less and less rational.”
