Poorly understood: China’s obsession with Taiwan
by WorldTribune Staff, August 5, 2025 Real World News
Why does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regard the conquest of Taiwan as essential to its quest for global dominance?
That the regime sees the island nation and democracy as an existential threat is poorly understood outside of the mainland and China-focused think tanks, an analyst wrote.
China’s military has on several occasions conducted war games simulating an invasion of Taiwan. / PLA photo
“Although Western analysts often frame the Taiwan Strait crisis as a legacy of an unfinished civil war or a matter of national reunification, this perspective misses the ideological, strategic and existential foundations of the CCP’s obsession with the island democracy,” Miles Yu, the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and a longtime contributing editor for Geostrategy-Direct.com , wrote for The Washington Times on Aug. 4.
“To fully grasp the threat, we must uncover the deeper drivers behind Beijing’s ambitions and recognize Taiwan’s pivotal place in the CCP’s global design.”
The CCP’s conquest of Taiwan “has never been a mere provincial concern or a nationalist grievance,” Yu wrote. It is “the unfinished chapter of the ‘War of Liberation,’ not a civil war but a sacred ideological mission.”
For communist leaders in Beijing, “the last vanguard of global communism” depends on taking Taiwan.
“After the collapse of the Soviet, Cuban and Eastern European communist regimes, the CCP exclusively sees itself as communism’s final torchbearer,” Yu wrote. “It is precisely in this messianic self-perception that Taiwan becomes indispensable.”
In CCP orthodoxy which is dispensed daily by China’s propaganda operation, the world is still enslaved by capitalist imperialism, led by the United States.
“In this narrative,” Yu wrote, “Taiwan is the ‘lost island,’ a defiant symbol of freedom that must be subdued for the communist world order to be complete. Failure to seize Taiwan would signify ideological defeat and unravel the very philosophical legitimacy of the CCP’s rule.”
The West, Yu continued, “has consistently failed to understand this ideological fervor. The prevailing narrative is centered on national reunification or residual civil war disputes, which obscures the ideological compulsion behind the CCP’s aggression.”
The Xi Jinping regime’s plan to invade Taiwan is not just about the land, it is “about rewriting the map of global power,” Yu wrote. “The PLA’s unparalleled preparations, including hypersonic weapons and cyberwarfare doctrines, signal that Beijing sees the Taiwan campaign as a prelude to something much larger: the dismantling of American military and technological superiority and, with it, the liberal international order.”
The CCP also sees Taiwan for its technological supremacy, including TSMC, the crown jewel of global semiconductor production.
“Seizing Taiwan means gaining leverage over the technologies that define the 21st century: artificial intelligence, medical innovation, quantum computing and beyond,” Yu wrote.
The greatest “threat” Taiwan poses to the CCP “may be philosophical, not military or technological,” Yu added. “Taiwan is living, breathing proof that a free, democratic, ethnically Chinese society can thrive without communist rule.”
“To the 1.4 billion Chinese living under censorship, repression and propaganda, Taiwan offers a mirror of what could be, and mirrors are dangerous for dictators.”
Yu concluded:
“It is time for the world to stop playing along with the CCP’s narrative. The belligerence toward Taiwan is not an issue of heritage or national pride. It is a doctrine of conquest, a strategy of global domination and a defense mechanism of an insecure regime built on lies.
“Only by exposing the ideological, strategic and moral fragility of the CCP can the democratic world confront its challenge with clarity. Taiwan is not a bargaining chip. It is a bulwark against tyranny. If we allow Beijing to snuff it out, we won’t just lose an island. We’ll lose the compass of freedom in Asia.
“Let us call the CCP’s bluff, see through its grand calculus and defend Taiwan not only for its own sake but also for the crucial interest of the United States and, ultimately, the future of liberty itself.”