China Is Not Going to Invade Taiwan

This marks our 10^th issue. By now, hopefully you have a sense that I’m rarely glib or overconfident in my analysis. I develop scenarios rather than make forecasts, and I prize nuance over the black-and-white “certainty” that algorithms reward.

Almost all of geopolitics lives in the grey, and it’s my goal to make nuance intelligible without drowning you in a series of what-ifs.

With that, whether you are new to this letter or returning, consider this a rare moment of presumptuousness:

China is not going to invade Taiwan.

The Situation: 

Last week, China released footage of a DF-17 hypersonic missile leaving the rail, and the carrier Liaoning came home from a record 40-day cruise. Cue the chorus of sensationalism and fear-mongering:

CHINA AIMS TO “ALTER THE STATUS QUO” IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

CHINA HAS “NEVER BEEN CLOSER TO SEIZING TAIWAN”

CHINA “COULD INVADE THE SELF-GOVERNING ISLAND OF TAIWAN AS EARLY AS NEXT YEAR”

Every week brings a new omen—the anniversary of D-Day, a completely unrelated natural disaster in Taiwan, a new set of Chinese military drills in the South China Sea—of Xi Jinping’s eventual move on Taiwan and the Third World War that follows: China storming the beaches around 2027, the American century ending in Tainan.

Now, “not going to invade” doesn’t mean that China isn’t actively trying to absorb Taiwan. It is. It’s also not to say that Taiwan will remain independent for the rest of this century. I doubt it will.

The truth is that China values Taiwan more than any actor that wants Taiwan to remain separate from the mainland, save for Taiwan itself. Absent state collapse, the trajectory of Beijing’s control and influence over its near abroad will increase. China’s aim of control, however, is not served by conquest. An amphibious invasion is Beijing’s least probable route, and the world’s obsession with WWIII is exactly the sort of “end of the world” thinking I try to combat.

The Afterthought That Became a Threat

For most of its history, China was a land power: The Great Wall was built to block invaders from the steppe, and the Silk Road ran overland. The Portuguese christened Taiwan “Ilha Formosa,” or “the beautiful island,” in the 17^th century. Ironic, considering the island was a malarial afterthought no dynasty bothered to govern until the Qing seized control in 1683.

Taiwan became a problem for mainland China only when outsiders turned it into a base off the Chinese coast: the Dutch, then the Japanese, then Chiang Kai-shek’s beaten Nationalists in 1949, then the Americans. Western imperialism brought China’s greatest threats from the sea, and China endured its Century of Humiliation precisely because it couldn’t repel them. Taiwan is both the emblem of that failure and a direct threat to China’s ability to trade with the world.

Picture the Confederacy fleeing to an island off Florida, declaring itself the true America, and accepting arms from a rival empire, and the view from Beijing comes into focus.

Why China Doesn’t Need to Invade

Perhaps you are thinking, Wait, didn’t you just make a case for precisely why China will invade Taiwan eventually? 

The question isn’t whether China wants Taiwan—it does—but what it will risk for it. China is not willing to make the same mistake Russia made in Ukraine. Russia had a much easier path to victory against an inferior opponent and could not accomplish its goal. Taking Taiwan means an amphibious assault across the ~110-mile Taiwan Strait. Even with the ships, planes, and marines for the landing, occupying 23 million objectors who built their wealth on technological skill is strategic madness. And Ukraine has shown how much drones favor a motivated defender.

Russia’s fatal assumption was that Ukrainians would not, or would not be able to, fight. Would the Taiwanese? This is the genuinely hard question, and it cuts both ways. In its favor: A January 2026 Academia Sinica survey found 58.7% willing to resist at all costs even with no American help. Against it: That majority is shrinking, and Taiwanese faith that America would actually arrive has slid from 45% in 2021 to 34% today.

Will isn’t fixed—it can be drained, and draining it is part of China’s strategy. But every time China tries too hard, Taiwanese sentiment hardens. The percentage of Taiwanese that say they prefer the status quo but move toward independence has increased by almost 4X since 1994. And the support for independence isn’t linear; it’s marked by spikes in sentiment due to Chinese actions, like the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis and China’s de-facto 2020 abolition of “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong.

China’s most significant advances have nothing to do with aircraft carriers, and everything to do with sapping Taiwan’s advantages. Most critical is the brain drain of Taiwanese engineers, whom China offers to pay three to four times what Taiwan firms do. By one 2019 count, some 3,000 chip engineers had already crossed to the mainland. Taiwan’s chip dominance came from one globalized moment under American hegemony, now finished.

In a multipolar world, everyone reshores: TSMC is building in Arizona, Japan, and Germany, while Beijing has poured tens of billions into its own fabs and makes credible seven-nanometer chips without Western machines. By the time China moves to absorb Taiwan, no one will depend on TSMC anymore. The faster China hastens that day—not just at home but by spurring chip drives in Japan, the US, and the EU—the faster Taiwan’s leverage weakens.

But weakening the so-called “silicon shield” is not China’s only strategy. China aims to diplomatically strangle Taiwan. After all, the US does not recognize Taiwan as a country. In 2016, 22 nations recognized Taiwan. Today, it’s down to 12.

Chaos, Not Conquest

China’s approach to influencing Taiwan’s politics is also changing. Look at the 2024 Taiwanese election…

Doublethink Lab, which monitors Chinese influence operations, logged over 10,000 pieces of suspicious coordinated content in the race’s final months and reached a telling conclusion: Beijing backed no single candidate. Instead of boosting the China-friendly KMT, its networks corroded trust from every direction, amplifying the “America will abandon Taiwan” doubt to weaken the DPP while seeding discord that fragmented the field. The result was the outcome Beijing prefers: a president elected with only 40% of the vote, a hung legislature, and a Taipei too divided to agree on its own defense—chaos that looks homegrown.

Taiwan is now the most disinformation-targeted society on earth, and its deadlocked legislature has scaled back the defense budget meant to deter invasion. The goal is no longer a pro-China Taiwan but an ungovernable one.

China’s military pressure serves the same purpose. Daily air incursions, severed undersea cables, and an “integration zone” dangled across the strait are all grey-zone pressures meant to normalize China’s presence and exhaust the island’s will to keep saying no. The clearest signal that China wants to pressure rather than invade is its own military drills, which rehearse blockade and quarantine, not a D-Day-style beach assault.

So, stop counting China’s carriers and start counting what’s actually moving: the defense budget and whether Taiwan’s legislature keeps slashing it, the diplomatic allies and which one falls next, the engineers and where they carry their talent.

The truth is attrition, not a bang: The Taiwan risk in a portfolio is mispriced as an event when it’s really a slow erosion, TSMC’s value is migrating off the island, and the coming decade in chips is a building boom rather than a single-island chokepoint. Taiwan is being lost—just not in a battle, and not on the day the headlines are waiting for.

Map/Chart of the Week:

Maximum temperatures have been far above seasonal averages:

This isn’t meant to cause alarm—the world isn’t ending—but it’s real and worth sharing.

Blind Spot: 

The New York Times ran a haunting dispatch this week from Anyar, in central Myanmar, where a doctor-turned-rebel commander dodges Russian-made jets and bomb-tossing paragliders in a civil war the world has filed under “forgotten.” More than 90,000 dead and 3.7 million displaced since the 2021 coup, and almost no Western attention. The humanitarian story is real, but the blind spot is that this forgotten war sits on inputs the modern economy cannot do without.

Start with magnets. Myanmar supplies roughly half of China’s heavy rare earths: the dysprosium and terbium that go in EV motors, wind turbines, and guided weapons; and in some recent years, nearly all of China’s imports. The mines sit in Kachin State, which the rebel Kachin Independence Army largely overran in late 2024. The chokepoint behind the very magnets Beijing weaponized against the West this past spring now runs through an ethnic militia in a war nobody is watching. Tin has a similar story. The Wa State’s Man Maw mine, around a tenth of global supply, has been dark since 2023, helping drive tin toward record highs near $38,000 a ton.

Then geography. Min Aung Hlaing’s junta survives on Chinese arms and money, and the prize is Kyaukphyu, the Bay of Bengal port and pipelines that let China pump Gulf oil to Yunnan and skip the Strait of Malacca entirely. India is in the same scramble, courting both the junta and the Arakan Army along its Kaladan corridor, because 80% of its rare earths come from China, and it would rather not. Add the world’s largest opium crop and a $40 billion scam-center economy, and one of the world’s least-covered wars quietly helps set the price of the magnets, tin, and energy security everyone else is rushing to lock down.

So why does a war this consequential get no airtime? Partly because the impact is laundered through China: Myanmar’s tin and rare earths cross into Yunnan, get processed, and reemerge as “Chinese” magnets, so price moves get filed under Beijing’s export controls rather than a mine changing hands in Kachin. Partly because the war is deliberately dark—military blackouts, no internet, no foreign reporters for years—and attention runs on images a place with no signal cannot produce. And partly because every actor that matters wants it quiet: China backs the junta and profits, the generals want no scrutiny, India and Thailand prize stability, ASEAN is paralyzed, and Washington has no stake it is willing to spend on.

Reader Question:

Finally… 

What I’m watching: World Cup

What I’m reading: Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remnick

What I’m listening to: Sinica Podcast, “China Shock 2.0: This Time It’s Europe, with Adam Tooze”