China Could Invade Taiwan and Lose

Key Points – While China under Xi Jinping consistently reiterates its goal of “reunification” with Taiwan—by force if necessary—and has undertaken extensive military modernization to enable such an operation, a successful invasion remains a highly complex and risky gamble.

-The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has not fought a major war in decades and lacks the “muscle memory” for an amphibious assault of this magnitude.

-Furthermore, Taiwan’s difficult geography, limited suitable landing beaches, and the ability of the US and its allies to monitor Chinese preparations present significant obstacles.

-A failed invasion would be a “spectacularly disastrous” and potentially regime-ending event for the Chinese Communist Party.

China Could Invade Taiwan and Fail

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has long made reunification with Taiwan (Republic of China) one of the key elements of his signature China Dream campaign, having announced it during the 19th Party Congress meeting in 2017.

This occasion was also not the first time unifying Taiwan with the mainland—by force if necessary—was the focus of major speeches by top Chinese leaders.

The annexation of the ROC has been considered a core interest of China’s rulers, and official statements to that effect have become standard CCP rhetoric since 2003, if not before. Most recently, Xi made this a point in his New Year’s speech on December 31, 2024, when he declared, “No one can stop the historical trend of reunification of the motherland”.

But beyond rhetoric and political posturing, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has taken concrete measures over the past decade to advance Beijing’s reunification agenda should an actual military takeover be the only option available.

Internal instability and other factors exacerbated by the pandemic have also prompted Beijing to intensify its actions aimed at reunifying with Taiwan.

Most of the mainland’s initiatives have also increasingly reinforced the message that the People’s Republic of China is willing to use force if necessary to affect that reunification.

Remolding the People’s Liberation Army

The CCP has expended considerable effort, resources, political capital, and foreign policy initiatives to advance the unification agenda.

At the top of the list of items in the toolbox and the primary instrument that would be employed should it be necessary to affect a takeover of the island of Taiwan is, of course, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

To those ends, the CCP has been working for years now to alter and modernize “the institutions and patterns of PLA mobilization, constructing and using civilian infrastructure in military exercises, and establishing a new status quo through increasingly coercive military exercises around Taiwan.”

Included in this process has been a top-to-bottom standardization of the PLA for “greater efficiency, effectiveness, combat readiness, stockpiling resources, and re-enlisting veterans with specific skills.”

The China scholar Oriana Skylar Mastro famously argued in her article “The Taiwan Temptation” that the increasing modernization of the PLA and the tempo at which it is acquiring new and more capable weapon systems creates a dynamic all of its own. Those expanding military capabilities and a rising sense of nationalism within the PRC could combine to propel Beijing into an invasion scenario simply as a function of increasing momentum if nothing else.

Mitigating Factors

However, merely having more, bigger and modern weapons, as well as better-equipped forces, does not necessarily mean that an invasion of the ROC is the wisest course of action.

Factors such as the timing of any forced reunification, potential diplomatic backlash, and the economic costs of the invasion must also be part of the calculation.

The PRC has consistently talked about its preference for a peaceful takeover of the island nation. However, Beijing has continued to state that the use of force remains on the table if other means do not yield the desired outcome.

“We are willing to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the utmost sincerity and endeavor,” Chen Binhua, spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, stated at a regular press briefing in Beijing in October 2024. “But we will never commit ourselves to renouncing the use of force,” he added pointedly.

“No matter how many troops Taiwan has and how many weapons it acquires, and no matter whether external forces intervene or not, if it [Taiwan] dares to take risks, it will lead to its own destruction,” he said to emphasize his point.

China has invested considerable sums in developing the capability to bring Taiwan under its control by force, but saying it and threatening to invade and actually doing it are two entirely different prospects.

Numerous military experts point out that invading Taiwan or even mounting a successful blockade “would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades.”

“It is hard to see the PLA mounting this kind of an operation when there is literally no muscle memory in the organization,” said a retired NATO-nation military intelligence officer. “If you try something this massive and you are doing it for the first time, you are asking for some potentially spectacularly disastrous results if the slightest item on the list goes sideways.”

Then there are geographical factors. Shallow waters meant that a PLAN fleet had to deploy landing craft far from shore, making them vulnerable as they approached the beaches of Taiwan. The terrain in the ROC is almost not friendly to an invasion force and is hard to navigate. Once ashore, the PLA would then face a fierce battle and urban warfare on a massive scale.

The exercises and other training that the PLA has engaged in as it prepares for an invasion of the ROC have also not gone unnoticed by the US and its allies. In May 2024, the PLA conducted a show of force by launching two days of intensive military exercises surrounding the ROC.

In response, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of the US military’s Indo-Pacific Command, commented that the exercises “looked like a rehearsal” for an invasion. “We watched it. We took note. We learned from it.  And they helped us prepare for the future.”

Why China Fears A Failed Taiwan Invasion

In short, such an invasion is not a small undertaking, and it is “rolling the dice,” said the same former intelligence officer. “A failed invasion means the end of the Communist Party so that the invasion would be an all-or-nothing proposition. The people around Xi Jinping know that. Therefore, they will think long and hard before taking that option.”

About the Author 

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw.  He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments, and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design.  Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.

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