Whether peace lasts is largely up to President Xi Jinping, China’s strongman. He gives ample grounds for pessimism
In part this reflects the breathtaking change of the past half-century. Taiwan has blossomed from a military dictatorship into a prosperous, liberal democracy of 24m people, nearly all of them Han Chinese. Its citizens are more than twice as rich as mainlanders. Their success is an implicit rebuke to China’s autocratic regime, and an obvious reason for them to resist being governed from Beijing.
But no country has done more to wreck the status quo than China. Whether peace lasts is largely up to President Xi Jinping, its strongman. He gives ample grounds for pessimism. As China has grown rich, he has nurtured an ugly, paranoid nationalism, stressing every humiliation it has suffered at the hands of perfidious foreign powers. He has linked unification with Taiwan to his goal of “national rejuvenation” by 2049.
The danger is that China uses the crisis to set new boundaries for its encroachments into what Taiwan considers its airspace and territorial waters. It could also attempt to impose even stricter limits on the island’s dealings with the rest of the world.
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