Is China preparing for war in the Taiwan Strait?

Something may be afoot in the Far East. As tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait and Beijing launches an unprecedented media campaign against Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, of course the question is not whether China maintains an interest in achieving reunification with Formosa—this has been an explicit strategic aim of the People’s Republic since 1949, when, at the end of the country’s Civil War, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek withdrew what was left of his battered forces across the strait. Instead, what has long mattered is whether the political and military developments in Beijing are shifting the likelihood, timing, or shape of a possible conflict. The internal changes unfolding within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may offer in this regard important clues.

Over the past year, Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have fired a large number of high-ranking generals and admirals, including figures responsible for the nation’s rocket forces, equipment procurement, and theatre-level operations. It is significant that these were not mid-tier officers; several sat at the uppermost levels of China’s military hierarchy. The current purge is exceptional in that it is targeting particularly big fish: He Weidong, China’s second-highest-ranking general was publicly expelled from the Communist Party; the same occurred to Admiral Miao Hua, until recently the People’s Liberation Army top political officer. His eviction marks the first time since the Cultural Revolution that a sitting commander of the Party’s Central Military Commission – China’s supreme military leadership organ – faces such opprobrium. 

While the official justifications generally involve corruption, the timing and breadth of the removals point to a broader political logic. It is harder to say which: Perhaps the leadership is seeking to consolidate loyalty, tighten command chains, and reduce institutional autonomy within the PLA; or instead it may be that the party leadership is withdrawing peacetime, armchair generals and replacing them with officers it finds more well suitable to fight an actual conflict. So which is it?

China has spent two decades modernising its forces. Defence spending has risen at a steady annual rate, reaching roughly a quarter-trillion dollars by 2025 and making the People’s Republic the second largest global spender. By numbers alone, the PLA Navy is now the world’s largest, with expanding amphibious lift capacity and three operational aircraft carriers. The most modern of these, the Fujian, entered into service earlier this month, and is only marginally smaller than America’s Ford Class vessels. The country has also begun the construction of its next class of supercarriers, the nuclear-propelled vessels of the Type 004 Class. Everything put together, China commissions 20 to 25 times more military vessels per annum than Britain’s Royal Navy, or 10-15 as many major combatants. According to a declassified intelligence slide from America’s Office of Naval Intelligence from 2023, China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 – two hundred and thirty two – times bigger than that of the United States. The country’s naval expansion is the fastest the world has seen since Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to build himself a fleet capable of surpassing London’s.

Of course, however, industrial capacity is not the same as military readiness or immediate intention. It is true that China has not fought a major conflict since 1979 in their brief war against Vietnam, leaving large parts of the PLA untested in conditions where improvisation and battlefield initiative matter as much as equipment. The very modernisation that has made the PLA more sophisticated has also made it more organisationally demanding: Joint operations require empowered commanders, agile decision loops, and resilience under stress. The ongoing purges may increase or decrease the fighting capability of the PLA – we’ll only really know if war comes.

China’s vast investments in anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) through powerful air defences and anti-ship assets would probably make it far too costly for the US and Allied navies to operate too close to Formosa, making a successful invasion probable. However, the danger Chinese strategists have to consider is that Taiwan turns out to be only the beginning of a Second Pacific War involving the United States and its powerful network of regional alliances and partnerships, including Japan, South Korea, Australia and even perhaps India and European NATO. For Chinese strategists, therefore, the main layer of complexity revolves around choosing the right moment to make a move. Beijing’s industrial superiority is currently overwhelming, but the country does not yet command a navy capable of seriously challenging the combined resources of the Western bloc in a fight for the Pacific and, therefore, for access to crucial trade lanes and the raw materials crucial to both war fighting and keeping the economy running at home.

For the Chinese, therefore, a crucial factor in taking the decision to go ahead with an invasion of Taiwan would be Russia’s stance. China’s northern neighbour is one of the world’s largest producers of raw materials and could largely supplant those imported by Beijing through sea routes. Without an assurance of Russian solidarity, it would be vastly more difficult – and, indeed, improbable – for the Chinese leadership to take the great risks of a Taiwan operation. The possibility of a Russo-American rapprochement, made greater by the ongoing Ukraine peace talks between Washington and Moscow, could therefore serve as an incentive for China to act before Moscow has the leeway to run a policy that is less reliant on the People’s Republic, and thus less favourable to it. The threat of a marked improvement in Russo-American relations could, thus, motivate an acceleration of China’s plans for Formosa. 

Meanwhile, another important consideration for Xi is the  exhaustion of Western military stockpiles in the context of the conflicts it has engaged in in Ukraine and the Middle East. As Responsible Statecraft recently put it, the “US depleted its missiles in Ukraine, Israel. Now it wants more fast.” After years of large-scale wars and faced with a weakened industrial base, the West’s limited weapon reserves night be seen by China as opening a significant window of opportunity. Indeed, this has been an oft repeated concern by realist thinkers and leaders, chief among them the United States’ current Under Secretary of War for Policy. Elbridge Colby has repeatedly warned that reduced reserves of everything from shells to air defence and cruise missiles could limit Washington’s ability to fight a high-intensity war against an adversary as powerful as China. China likely agrees.

Despite this, there are many deterrents for China to consider. Today, a large-scale conflict in the Pacific would risk China’s economic model, which remains intertwined with global trade and foreign investment. The degree of Russian assistance, in the context of recovering relations with the US and healthy ties with India, remains an open question. Worse, a move against Taiwan would face an untested military with the most difficult type of operation modern warfare has to offer. And it would likely trigger long-term regional counterbalancing in ways Beijing would prefer to avoid for now, knowing that long-term dynamics and development patterns likely favour it over its adversaries. Indeed, by 2040, the difference in state capacity between China, Japan, and the US will likely be significantly larger than it is today.

The likeliest conclusion, then, advises neither alarmism nor complacency. What is clear is that Xi is making sure he holds the military, political, and narrative cards to act with little to no warning – and that, itself, is strategically decisive.