Flag of the Republic of Formosa, which existed for only a few months in 1895. By Jeff Dahl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3550776
But why, you may ask, would the Chinese risk such a move?
The answer to that would have to be found in the answer to the question, why do nations start wars? And the answer to that is much more difficult to answer than we might suppose.
First, let's look at the risk v. the benefits to the People's Republic of China invading Taiwan.
The most obvious part of the answer to that question would be the one a wag would give. Red China would get Taiwan. But Taiwan in and of itself is obviously not the goal.
Nations do invade other nations simply for territorial gain, although that has become increasingly uncommon since World War Two. Indeed, now it's very rare, and frankly it's been fairly rare since 1945. When nations invade another country, if we assume that the Chinese view Taiwan as another country (and they don't, really) there's always more to it. Indeed, the Second World War saw most of the real outright land grabs by aggressor states. The last one I can really think of since World War Two was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which had that feature.
Given that, for the most part when nations, post 1945, invade another, they have some claim of some sort to the territory they're seeking to incorporate. Indeed, this was the case prior to 1945 as well, and a few of the minor aggressor states in the Second World War entered the war on the Axis side with this goal themselves. Romanian sought, for example, to incorporate Moldova, which it borders and which is ethnically Romanian. They went further than that, charged up with aggressor greed, but that was their primary goal. Finland, which went into the "Continuation War" without greed, provides another example, and they actually stopped once they had reoccupied what they'd lost the prior year, not even going further and taking all the ethnically Finnish lands that they could have.
That provides clue here really. What the Chinese would really get is the Chinese population of Taiwan combined with the island and its strategic value, and the Republic of China's industrial base.
Okay, what of those.
Well, that may all be fairly illusory.
We'll start with the islands strategic position. It's real. . . but not as real as it once was.
Taiwan, or Formosa if you prefer, is a major Western Pacific island and all the really big Western Pacific Islands have traditionally been island bastions. Japan was an island bastion nation in and of itself, and it really still is. The Philippines were an American bastion, although one that fell fairly rapid. Taiwan was a Chinese bastion, then a Japanese bastion, then a Nationalist Chinese bastion.
Or was it.
We noted the other day that Japan secured Taiwan as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. At that time, Taiwan really made sense as a Japanese possession, even if that result was not just. It provided a large island landmass off of China which gave it a base to protect its interests in China, or to mess with China if it wanted to, and it wanted to.
But, by 1941, its utility had diminished. The United STates considered invading Taiwan rather than the Philippines in its advance toward the Japanese home islands, but it didn't. That's partially due to political considerations, but it was partially as we didn't need to. That didn't mean, however, that the Japanese needed to quit defending it. They had to garrison it right until the end of the war.
And the Philippines themselves were abandoned by the US after the Vietnam War. We just didn't need a base there anymore. An American military commitment to the Philippines quietly remains, but it serves in a nearly clandestine way in an ongoing war against radical Muslim elements in the country.
The modern aircraft carrier, from the American point of view, made the Philippines unnecessary to us.
China doesn't have modern carriers. . . like ours. . .yet, but it's working on them. But the real strategic value of the islands to China is that they're in the way. If China was to get into a war with the United States, Formosa would be an American base against it, or at least we can presume so. And it would be difficult for Chinese forces in the region to avoid it. So, oddly enough, it might have what essentially amounts to a negative strategic value to China. I.e., if they're thinking they're likely to fight the US, they need to grab it.
But that probably doesn't provide the motivation for grabbing the island, as China likely knows that the only way it gets into a war with the US is by providing one itself, such as by attacking Taiwan.
So what about Taiwan's industrial base?
Well, Taiwan does have an advanced economy. It's more advanced than Red China's in fact. That might be tempting, but in reality it surely isn't a consideration. China's vastness and large-scale command economy enterprises really don't need Taiwan's more advanced corporate free market industries, and indeed, there'd be no guaranty that a war to seize Taiwan, or the Taiwanese themselves, might not wreck them. And frankly, taking in millions of Chinese who have worked in a Western economy into a Communist command economy would be unlikely to go really smoothly. That actually provides us with a clue as to why the Chinese might invade, actually, which we'll get to in a moment.
China would get the Taiwanese Chinese, many of whom had ancestors who left mainland China in 1948, together with those Chinese who left in 1948, or since. That's what they want, combined with lands that have been historically governed by China.
That may seem odd. China doesn't have a deficit of people. But ethnic reunification has been a driving factor of wars over history and it's been particularly strong since 1918. A lengthy post World War One period saw multiple border wars and invasions that were over nothing other than ethnicity. Nations that had been imperial possessions fought to be independent single ethnicity nation states. Nations with messy ethnic boundaries slugged it out in the 1920s over who got to rule those areas. The first moves of Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939 were excused by the Germans on this basis, although outright colonial and genocidal invasions followed, which were on a completely different basis.
Since World War Two China has grabbed territory that what not Chinese, ethnically. But here, its primary motivations are to accomplish that goal, reunification, and to assuage Chinese pride. Taiwan is Chinese, in the PRC's mind, and they have a right to it. That's the justification.
But is a justification upon which they're likely to act?
It certainly wouldn't be cost free.
Besides being involved in a war with the Republic of China, invading Taiwan obviously will provoke some sort of international reaction, and China knows that.
In recent years China has abandoned the Stalinist command economy model that it had for decades following 1948, complete with murder on a mass scale, and gone towards more of a command economy NEP model It may have done that in part as it was a witness to the Stalinist model crashing in the late 1980s when the USSR found that it had run its course, and it was too late to adapt. Chances are high that the NEP model will do the same, but the NEP model of Communism, being gentler and allowing for more liberty, if still falling far short of the Capitalist model, will forestall that for a while and probably has convinced the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party that they have a chance of avoiding its fall altogether.
If China invades Taiwan, however, they'll face an economic disruption at a bare minimum.
However, based on their observations of the West and how little it really does in this area, they may simply not really believe it. Russia has managed to survive sanctions, for example. And the Chinese know that they're such a big part of the world's economy that they may feel that, for the most part, sanctions will simply be lip service.
And frankly, they'd have reason to believe that.
If they were wrong, however, it would be economically devastating. And economics being what they are, China might not recover for decades, if ever. Manufacturing might simply shift to the south and leave China with a massively failing market. If so, it'd revert to Stalinism by default, if it could.
And it might not be cost free militarily.
China certainly is building up its military, to be sure, but any invasion of the island would be bloody. It might be really bloody if the United States intervened on Taiwan's behalf, which it very well would likely do. Indeed, even with a limited strategic goal, it might be a rampaging naval failure which would send thousands of Chinese soldiers and sailors to a watery grave, and leave many more stranded on Taiwan in one way or another while the Republic of China cut them apart. And a military failure on China's part would have long reaching implications of all sorts, including diplomatic, military and economic.
And even if it was successful, the primary achievement would be to take in 24,000,000 Chinese who have grown up and participated in a free market democratic state and who would be massively disgruntled in a Red Chinese one. The Red Chinese have't seen the Chinese of Hong Kong, 7,000,000 in number, go quietly into the night even though there's nearly nothing they can do about the government in Beijing.
All that would be problematic enough, but there's already discontent in China itself. The events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square showed that the young Chinese middle class isn't thrilled with their country's autocratic Communist government, and it also showed that elements of sympathy with students had crept into the Chinese Army. Indeed, as the Chinese Army's makeup is regional in character, the Chinese had to bring in army units from outside the region to suppress the demonstrations. This ended up creating a sort of odd resistance movement in the form of the Fulun Gong, which is ongoing and which operates now partially out of the US, publishing the right wing propaganda newspaper for an American audience, The Epic Times (which absurdly claims that everything was nifty prior to 1948).
So the net result would be, best case scenario, to take in 25,000,000 new people who would be opposed to your reign in every fashion in exchange for an island that you only really need if you intend to be aggressive somewhere else, in a pre aircraft carrier naval fashion. The worst result would be a bloody defeat that leaves the nation embarrassed and an international pariah.
So why do it?
Well, for a reason that has nothing to do with much of the above.
Lots of wars were fought after World War One solely on the question of whose nation a scrap of territory would be in. The Poles fought to unite to newly established Poland territories that were Polish, or which had been at one time. The Turks briefly tried to expand the border of Turkey into ancestral Turkish homelands. Many other examples exist. All of these are the flipside of national independence movements. We're used to the concept of, for example, the Irish wanting to be free of the United Kingdom, but we don't often stop to think that this impulse isn't also what drives desires to do something like unite Ulster to the Irish state, even though it has a large non Irish population. It's comparable to the Polish independence movements that existed during World War One which spilled out into wars and proxy wars after independence to secure territory that was Polish or had been. Nations risk all to engage in that impulse.
And the Chinese government in Beijing is proud, wounded, and arrogant.
It's pride and history leave it convinced that it must take back all that was once Chinese, and that may be enough to cause it to act.
And its arrogance may be sufficient to override any concerns that the West would act. Recent history suggest that belief would not be irrational, although history also suggests that at some point, the reaction sets in. Nobody helped the Czechs keep the Sudetenland in 1938. . . but when it came to Poland. . .
And history suggest that this impulse has a time element to it as well, which may motivate the Chinese to act. People retain long memories, stretching back centuries, of their ethnicity. . . until suddenly they don't.
Lots of example of this abound. All the Scandinavian people were at one time one people, but by the Renaissance they were no longer thinking of themselves that way and fought wars against each other in order to be ruled by one another. At some point the Norwegians and Swedes simply weren't one people, even though they retain a mutually intelligible language now. The Estonians and Finns were once one people as well, and then weren't. The connection is sufficiently close that Finnish volunteers came to fight for Estonia in its war of independence against Soviet Russia, but they didn't become one state. The Scots were Irish early in their history, but don't conceive of themselves in that fashion at all now. The Dutch were a Germanic people from the "far lands", but they've long had their own identity and don't think of themselves as German. The Portuguese were Spanish at one time, but don't want to be part of Spain, and the Catalonians are Spanish, but don't want to think of themselves that way.
Going into perhaps more analogous examples, when Germany reunited following the collapse of the Communism in the West, the process was not only rocky, but some East Germans have never really accommodated themselves to it and some West Germans continue to look down on them. Ethnic Germans from elsewhere, still eligible to enter the country under its law of return, have been completely foreign to Germans from Germany who have been shocked by them.
And up close and personal, young South Koreans are very quickly reaching the point that they don't want to reunite with the North, long a dream of the government in Seoul, as North Koreans now are more or less an alien Korean-speaking people.
At some point the Chinese in Beijing may start worrying about that. It's already the case that the government in Taipei no longer claim the right to rule on the mainland. Have they started thinking of themselves as a Chinese other? After all, there's more than one Chinese culture. . .why not add one more. . . one with its own state?
Keeping that from happening may be a Communist Chinese priority, and not for economic or even territorial reasons.
