“On the eve of war” is how Chinese scholar Shi Yaunhua described the geopolitical situation relating to Taiwan to an audience at the Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies in November. Thomas Des Garets Geddes summarizes and translates this presentation at Sinification.
”China has determined dispassionately that the United States is the only country that is hindering or that could interrupt its rise, [the only country that] is undermining its national reunification [with Taiwan] and that a strategic contest [战略较量] between China and the US is inevitable. Since 2021, there has even been a certain ‘warlike’ [临战: lit. on the eve of war] character to this. This is particularly true on the issue of Taiwan, where maintaining our determination to go to war at any moment [今夜就开战: lit. go to war tonight] is essential and where preparedness averts peril [有备无患].
Thomas Des Garets Geddes. “China’s Grand Strategy in Asia and Beyond, According to Shi Yuanhua,” Sinification. December 3, 2023.
The presentation is entitled, “The Big Picture of China’s Strategy Towards its Periphery and the Main Policies of its Approach.”
Shi Yuanhua goes on to say that “time and advantage are on China’s side.” A war with the US should be avoided, and to do so, China should strategically “avoid the expansion and breakdown of the inherent structural contradictions between both sides as well as the emergence of bloc confrontation.”
Monkton reads this as saying that China can go about its conquest of Taiwan without fighting a war if it can nullify the threat from the United States. It does so by avoiding “inherent structural contradictions between both sides.” It is worth thinking about what such contradictions might mean in terms of trade, resource economics, as well as attitudes about governance, democracy, and liberty.
Also, the avoidance of “bloc confrontation” suggests that Chinazis fear the rise of coalitions of countries building common-cause alliances to thwart Chinazi expansion and aggression.
