China’s recent live fire military exercises around Taiwan have increased concerns about its arms buildup and intentions regarding Taiwan.1 Such moves by China highlight the urgency of the debate about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself and the U.S. commitment to its defense. The outcome of this debate will have repercussions around the world and for the rest of the century. We urgently need to understand the issues at stake and the ways our decision-making will affect the future.
In the first place, there should be little doubt about China’s plans for a forceful occupation. Taiwan has the most reliable assessments of Chinese plans, and we should take their concerns very seriously, as the Taiwanese will be most affected by Chinese foreign policy and have the best resources for evaluating it. In looking at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) discussions, government messaging, and the details of China’s military buildup, it has become clear to the Taiwanese that China’s economic and political actions over the last two decades can be summed up as a methodical, long-term preparation for taking Taiwan. In addition to aircraft carriers, the Chinese have been building amphibious landing craft and portable port facilities to successfully carry out an invasion. They have been making their economy more self-sufficient through the acquisition of key resources and technology. At the same time, they have worked hard to make themselves indispensable to the rest of the world through their near monopoly over rare earth minerals and their commitment to industrial capacity. Finally, they have been engaging in an intensive propaganda campaign in Taiwan to create a sense of the inevitability of occupation by China.
In my meetings with Taiwanese foreign policy experts this past summer, virtually all of them anticipate some sort of invasion or other aggressive action in the next one to three years. The differences of opinion concern the way in which Taiwan should react to this situation. President William Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) reaffirmed Taiwan’s determination to defend its sovereignty and is working hard to prepare Taiwan’s military for an invasion.2 While recognizing that Taiwan will depend on using asymmetric weapons such as mines and drones to counter an invasion, they also understand that ships and plans are necessary right now in order to challenge Chinese incursions into Taiwanese waters and air space. However, the Kuomintang (KMT), which dominates the legislature, has blocked President Lai’s attempts to increase military spending and proposes to try and find accommodations with the CPP in order to forestall or prevent an invasion. These voices recognize, however, that such a strategy would, over the long term, still lead eventually either to a delayed invasion or to a coerced surrendering of Taiwan.
The KMT, having been a vociferously anti-communist party for most of the twentieth century, has surprisingly changed its position in this century to become a crucial partner for the CCP. The KMT suggests that Taiwan should cooperate more with China, particularly on economic issues, and that a more conciliatory approach would be the best for Taiwan’s economy. Since losing elections twenty years ago and becoming an opposition party after decades in power, the KMT has been using this economic message as a way to gain back votes. Unfortunately, this approach is dangerous because increasing economic dependence on China could turn Taiwan into the next Hong Kong, in which tight economic ties have led to political subjugation and the elimination of liberal democratic freedoms. Through their dominance in the legislature, the KMT has been opposing President Lai’s efforts and thereby hampering Taiwan’s project of increasing and revamping its military forces, most recently by beginning impeachment proceedings.3 The KMT might even move toward promoting the CCP’s ideal scenario of a “voluntary” merging with China that would amount to a surrender of Taiwan’s sovereignty along the lines of the Hong Kong model of eventual total subjugation.
To pursue the CCP ambition to occupy Taiwan, Chinese commentators have been appealing to President Trump to “call on Taiwan to stand down”4 and move toward “formally opposing Taiwanese independence.”5 In order to convince the United States of China’s peaceful intentions in spite of its ongoing military buildup, which includes a new, third aircraft carrier and a series of amphibious landing barges,6 they have been improbably promoting the idea that Taiwan poses a military threat to China, claiming that “Taiwan and the United States will have to countenance some military buildup to allow for credible deterrence from China.”7 Using an awkward formulation to mask a ludicrous justification for China’s vast arms buildup, such diplomatic gaslighting has become the primary strategy in China’s attempt to suggest that the United States and Taiwan are the aggressors and should “stand down.”
Cultural Politics
While Taiwan will continue to rely on U.S. support, Taiwan will need to be the primary actor in its own defense. As the war in Ukraine has shown, the key consideration for Taiwan’s future will be the way the Taiwanese understand their political identity and their commitment to maintaining it. Cultural politics will be crucial for Taiwan’s continuing existence as a sovereign state. The KMT, because it historically sought to return to rule all of China, has taken on the role today of emphasizing the Chinese character of Taiwan by promoting cooperation with the CCP, partly for economic reasons and partly by appealing to a common cultural heritage. The DPP does not deny this shared heritage yet also insists that Taiwan is a separate sovereign state with its own traditions and trajectory.
One way to understand the complexity of this discussion of Taiwanese culture is to consider the myth-making around Koxinga (鄭成功), the Chinese general who in 1662 succeeded in driving out the Dutch, who had dominated Taiwan since arriving in 1624. His significance for Taiwan illustrates the complexity of Taiwanese identity. The son of a Ming dynasty merchant and a Japanese mother, Koxinga spent the first years of his life in Japan, then moved to Fujian in China, where he succeeded in the imperial examinations during the Ming dynasty. When the Ming were deposed by the Manchus to establish the Qing dynasty in 1644, Koxinga remained loyal to the Ming dynasty, leading its resistance to Qing dominance. After unsuccessfully laying siege to Nanjing, he went to Taiwan, allied with the indigenous people, and expelled the Dutch in order to be able to establish Taiwan as a base to continue his resistance to the Qing dynasty. Though he died of illness shortly thereafter, his son and grandson maintained an independent rule over Taiwan until the Qing were able to take Taiwan in 1683, ruling until the end of the nineteenth century. In this period, any honoring of Koxinga’s legacy was officially forbidden because he was a Ming loyalist against the Qing dynasty. At the same time, though he allied with some of the indigenous people, they likely considered Koxinga as another foreign invader.
After two centuries of Qing dynasty rule, the Japanese occupied Taiwan in 1895, and they subsequently made Koxinga into a hero who epitomized the relationship between Taiwan and Japan through his Japanese background. The period of Japanese rule meant that Taiwan escaped much of the upheaval in China during the twentieth century, and modern Taiwanese identity diverged significantly from Chinese consciousness due to the relative peace in Taiwan in the early twentieth century.
The real violence in Taiwan occurred after the Japanese were expelled in 1945. When the KMT took control and in 1949 fled to Taiwan along with two million followers, they began using Taiwan as a base of resistance against the Chinese Communists. However, the brutal authoritarian character of their rule, known as the White Terror, created a conflict with the native-born Taiwanese. Koxinga continued to be heroized by the KMT as a precursor to their own leader, Chiang Kai-shek, since both of them used Taiwan as a base from which to oppose usurpers in China, but that legacy also could reinforce the chasm separating the oppressive Chinese “foreigners” from the native Taiwanese.
Today, Koxinga is still celebrated in Taiwan, with statues of him all over the country and Tainan’s National Cheng Kung University named after him. Koxinga’s legacy is ambivalent for those who seek to maintain Taiwanese independence. On the one hand, he expelled the Dutch and worked with the indigenous Taiwanese to maintain Taiwan as independent from the Qing dynasty. On the other hand, he also established Chinese rule over Taiwan, thereby undermining the self-rule of the indigenous population. In China itself Koxinga is currently celebrated as an anti-imperialist who expelled Westerners so that the Han Chinese could rule Taiwan. This interpretation reinforces the Chinese attempt to cast themselves as the victims of Western imperialism when in fact China itself has now become the imperialist power.
The struggle over Koxinga’s legacy is not merely academic in nature. In Taiwan, as in China, his meaning defines the debate over Taiwanese political identity. On the one hand, there are those who emphasize a shared Chinese history and tradition and can point to the common use of Mandarin as an official language as well as the strong Chinese influence on customs and rituals. On the other hand, there is still a lingering Japanese influence on Taiwanese culture, and the indigenous Taiwanese population has its own language, history, and culture as well. This Taiwanese cultural tradition, along with the recent history of the political struggle to establish democracy against the authoritarianism of KMT rule, provides much of the basis for support for the DPP.
This link to the pro-democracy struggle has meant that the sense of a separate Taiwanese cultural identity is inextricably linked with the question of liberal democracy. After enduring the authoritarian dictatorship of the KMT for decades, Taiwan has developed a liberal democratic political system that demonstrates to the world and to China how a Chinese-influenced culture can develop its own liberal democratic traditions that defend the rule of law and in which the people take control of their own destiny. In resisting China, the Taiwanese are insisting on their right to live their lives according to their values and thus participate in the shaping of their own history. Part of this involves their ability to know the truth about the past during their own experience of authoritarianism, while the CCP constantly tries to cover up similar abuses in China. Another part is the enforcement of legal protections against arbitrary government decisions, the use of free elections, and the ability of people to form their own community organizations, such as churches, small businesses, and political movements, all of which are severely restricted in China.
Taiwan and the World
The KMT argument for increasing economic engagement with China as a way to deter the political and military threat that it poses is a more extreme version of a similar decision that faces all the other countries in the world. Democracy and freedom are being challenged globally by China’s authoritarian model,8 which is based on Marxism but also rooted in centuries-old structures: on the one hand, a bureaucratic state that manages the people from the top down; on the other hand, a centralized notion of culture in which China considered itself the Middle Kingdom that was the seat of world culture and regarded other cultures as barbaric the further they were from the Chinese center. In China, Zhang Weiwei has claimed that China is a civilizational state with its own trajectory that diverges from the West.9 As opposed to seeing the conflict between the CCP and Taiwan as an ideological one,10 some Western postliberals also seek to frame such conflicts as a civilizational struggle.11 This stance presumes that culture moves forward from the past when in fact culture involves a backward look that chooses what is relevant from the past that matches our current values. The idea of competing civilizations rejects the ability of one culture to learn from another and downplays the importance of our ethical values in making choices about our relationship to various traditions.
In arguing that China necessarily includes Taiwan, the CCP, by challenging Taiwanese sovereignty, is rejecting a Westphalian nation-state model of world order that is premised on the sovereignty of each individual nation-state. As much as the CCP emphasizes nation-state sovereignty in fending off criticism of its human rights record, its moves against Taiwan can only be justified based on a civilizational understanding of sovereignty rather than one based on nation-states.12 The nation-state system provides the basis for popular sovereignty—that is, government of the people, by the people, and for the people—because it allows cultural and political traditions to develop independently in each nation-state based on the people’s sense of right and wrong. By contrast, the CCP’s threats to Taiwan, its suppression of dissent in Hong Kong, and its genocidal policies in Xinjiang and Tibet indicate that it is one of history’s worst imperialists. Not content to simply assert a CCP vision of Chinese identity, it seeks to subjugate other peoples and in the extreme cases to totally eradicate other cultures. Similarly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is also based on a rejection of nation-state sovereignty as well as of popular sovereignty and the cultural independence of the other nations surrounding Russia.
To the extent that the world is only now waking up to the long-term threat of CCP domination, the CCP has a window of opportunity for both taking Taiwan and, on the heels of this action, expanding its military and political power across the globe. By recently playing its rare earth minerals card as a counter to Trump’s tariffs and thereby alerting the world to the danger of its monopoly, China has set itself an approximately five-year window for military action until the world has been able to find substitutes for Chinese suppliers. While the Trump administration has recognized this threat and is realigning U.S. priorities in response, most of the world is very ill prepared for long-term political and military conflict with China, and in many cases countries are subordinating political considerations to economic ones. Such an approach would be short-sighted, since it would open the way not simply to economic domination but also to a type of political domination that would suppress the ability of people all over the world to determine their own lives and futures.
Militarily, politically, and economically, Taiwan is the key first step for the CCP to realize its goal of dominating the world by 2049, as expressed in Xi Jinping’s recent highlighting of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in the context of “great changes unseen in a century.”13 Chinese occupation of Taiwan would destroy the center of the first island chain, extending from South Korea, Japan, and to the Philippines, that restricts China’s ability to project its growing military power across the world, and it would encourage newly threatened countries to begin to ally more with China for economic development and in their political orientation. Aside from providing China with control over the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, which currently produces 90 percent of the world’s supply of the most advanced AI chips, the Chinese takeover of Taiwan would also deprive the world of one of the key political antagonists to the CCP’s ambitions. Its deep understanding of China’s politics, economy, and culture make Taiwan into a crucial ally for all those countries seeking to protect their own sovereignty. Most importantly, the existence of Taiwan poses a fundamental propaganda threat to China’s model of totalitarian capitalism (reminiscent of Nazi Germany in its corporatist structures and the use of slave labor) and in this way underlines the urgency for China of subjugating it.14 As the CCP understands, the most effective way of countering Chinese imperialism will be to preserve an independent Taiwan.
Topics: China Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
Joyu Wang, “Chinese Military Drills Send ‘Stern Warning’ after U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2025.
“Lai Urges Unity on National Defense,” Taipei Times, January 2, 2026, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2026/01/02/2003849907.
“Legislative Yuan Moves to Impeach Lai,” Taipei Times, December 27, 2025, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2025/12/27/2003849578.
Wu Xinbo, “The Case for a Grand Bargain between America and China: How Trump and Xi Can Reset Relations,” Foreign Affairs, December 31, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/case-grand-bargain-between-america-and-china.
Da Wei, “America and China Can Have a Normal Relationship: How to Move Past Strategic Competition,” Foreign Affairs, October 30, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-and-china-can-have-normal-relationship.
H. I. Sutton, “China Suddenly Building Fleet of Special Barges Suitable for Taiwan Landings,” Naval News, October 1, 2025, https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/01/china-suddenly-building-fleet-of-special-barges-suitable-for-taiwan-landings/.
Wu Xinbo, “The Case for a Grand Bargain.”
Adam K. Webb, “‘Oriental Despotism,’ Meritocracy, and the Fate of the Global New Class,” Telos 211 (Summer 2025): 9–31, here 9, http://journal.telospress.com/content/2025/211/9.full.pdf+html.
Zhang Weiwei, The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State (Hackensack, NJ: World Century Publishing, 2012), pp. 55–84.
Miles Yu, “Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments,” Telos 201 (Winter 2022): 51–61, here 53–57, http://journal.telospress.com/content/2022/201/51.full.pdf+html.
John Milbank, “The Politics of Virtue,” Telos 212 (Fall 2025): 25–37, here 26–27, http://journal.telospress.com/content/2025/212/25.full.pdf+html; Adrian Pabst, “Renewing the West’s Unique Universalism,” Telos 201 (Winter 2022): 165–88, here 165–68, http://journal.telospress.com/content/2022/201/165.full.pdf+html.
David Pan, “Human Rights and Nation-State Sovereignty,” Telos 203 (Summer 2023): 99–108, here 106–9, http://journal.telospress.com/content/2023/203/99.full.pdf+html.
Xi Jinping [习近平], Xi Jinping: The Governance of China [习近平谈治因理政], vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press [外文出版社], 2020), p. 77; cited in Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021), p. 263. Doshi traces the changes in the CCP stance toward world order since 2017 in a series of Party documents. See Doshi, The Long Game, pp. 261–76.
On using totalitarianism to describe China, see Salvatore Babones, “Yes, You Can Use the T-Word to Describe China,” Foreign Policy, April 10, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/10/china-xi-jinping-totalitarian-authoritarian-debate/. On corporatism in China, see Shaomin Li, The Rise of China, Inc.: How the Chinese Communist Party Transformed China into a Giant Corporation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022). For documentation of forced labor in China, see U.S. Department of State, “Forced Labor in China’s Xinjiang Region,” January 20, 2025, https://www.state.gov/forced-labor-in-chinas-xinjiang-region.