What is China up to?

The last few weeks have seen a sharp increase in the belligerence of the Beijing regime.  Most prominently, the gangster state has committed its most extensive aerial violations of Taiwan's vicinity ever, prompting an unusually tough warning from the US, and is engaged in a new round of bullying rhetoric against the democratic island nation.  It has also been harassing and provoking Malaysia and Indonesia at sea.

Does this mean that a major act of aggression, such as an invasion of Taiwan, is imminent?  Probably not, but we can't be complacent.

The regime has an obvious motive for saber-rattling.  The Evergrande debt crisis, and the self-inflicted energy shortage which has caused electricity cut-offs in many Chinese cities, have thrown the regime's incompetence and corruption into unusually sharp relief.  In such situations, it's not uncommon for a dictatorship to make a show of belligerence against external enemies, with the aim of evoking a rally-round-the-flag effect among its own disgruntled subjects.  There's some grounds for hoping the regime is putting on a show of this kind while trying to minimize the risk of provoking actual military conflict -- the aerial incursions around Taiwan have been into the country's "air defense identification zone", not its actual airspace.

Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that dictatorships respond to domestic crises by actually starting wars, not just saber-rattling.  The Argentine military regime's invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 comes to mind.  The thugs apparently gambled that Britain would not fight -- a gamble that backfired disastrously.  Still, dictators perennially make that kind of miscalculation about democracies, no matter how many previous dictators have come to ruin by doing so.

Perhaps the strongest argument against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the likely consequences of such an act.  Taiwan is more militarily powerful than its size would suggest; it's unlikely that it could actually defeat a determined invasion on its own, but it could probably draw more blood -- especially via an all-out retaliatory campaign of attacks on infrastructural targets in China -- than the Beijing regime is willing to risk shedding.  And as I pointed out last week, the pathetic state of China's building and manufacturing raises questions about the quality of its military equipment as well.

There is also the question of how the rest of the democratic world would react.  In the 1930s, other democracies stood by and did nothing as the Nazi regime annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, a display of weakness which emboldened Hitler and made a world war inevitable.  Failure to fight for Taiwan against a Chinese invasion would repeat that precedent, probably with the same long-term result.  A serpent must be crushed the first time it tries to strike, lest it become more aggressive and dangerous.  Policymakers in Washington, Tokyo, London, and New Delhi undoubtedly understand this -- and those in Beijing know that they understand it.  Even if the regime is willing to risk massive death and destruction over Taiwan, it is not so insane as to think it can fight half the world.

Finally, even if China conquered Taiwan and got away with it, such a display of expansionism would inevitably drive Japan to build a nuclear deterrent of its own, as well as beefing up its already-very-formidable conventional military.  If the US did not fight for Taiwan, the Japanese could not count on us to fight for them either -- so they would have to look to their own security in the face of the giant neighbor suddenly become much more obviously dangerous.  Nationalist elements have been on the rise in Japan for some years, and once the psychological barrier was breached, Japan could easily build a nuclear arsenal much larger than China's own, eventually eclipsing China as the dominant regional power (and radically re-shaping the world order as we've known it since 1945).  It's hard to imagine anything Beijing would fear more than this -- which is another reason for it to eschew an invasion of Taiwan which could provoke such a result.

So on balance, I think it is unlikely that China will invade Taiwan.  There are too many likely negatives, from the regime's own viewpoint.

And yet.....the memory of 1982 still gnaws, when the Argentine gangster-state made that stupid miscalculation which it should have known would lead to its own downfall.  The situation around Taiwan bears close watching.

[Image at top:  Taipei, capital of Taiwan]