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In August 2024, scholars at a Xiamen-based think tank published a paper urging Beijing to immediately establish a shadow Taiwan government on the Chinese mainland in preparation for a full takeover of the island. “It is imperative to prepare a plan for the comprehensive takeover of Taiwan after unification,” they said. The scholars were writing at a fraught moment for Beijing.
Only months earlier, the anti-China Democratic Progressive Party had taken office after a third consecutive presidential election win. Unusually for a Chinese publication on such a sensitive topic, the paper made several frank admissions: that opposition to unification within Taiwan had deepened rather than softened; that Hong Kong’s post-1997 governance model was ill-suited to Taiwan; and that many Chinese officials lacked even a basic understanding of political and social conditions on the island. The paper circulated briefly before disappearing from China’s internet, which underscored the sensitivity of the topic and the rarity of such candor.
Outside of China, analysis of Taiwan remains overwhelmingly focused on the mechanics of a potential maritime blockade or military takeover, for understandable reasons. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would rank among the most economically and militarily disruptive events of the 21st century. Yet the emphasis on how Beijing might use force to seize Taiwan has come at the expense of an equally significant question of how it would attempt to rule the island afterwards. The Xiamen paper was notable not because it represented official policy, but because it acknowledged the broader, largely opaque debate underway on this topic inside the People’s Republic of China.
As with early discussions of the war in Ukraine, a narrow focus on battlefield outcomes obscures the potentially more difficult and ultimately more decisive problem of a post-conflict occupation. Military victory, even if achieved at extraordinary cost, would not resolve the Taiwan problem as the Chinese Communist Party defines it. It would instead set off a prolonged and uncertain phase marked by acute governance and administrative challenges, potential legitimacy deficits, and sustained struggles between a victorious external power and a resistant society.
Taiwan would present categorically different challenges from those Beijing has faced in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or other peripheral regions. Taiwan is a high-income liberal democracy with a strong political identity, dense civic institutions, an independent legal culture, a boisterous free media, and deep integration into global economic, high-tech, and informational networks. Governing such a society by force would impose high and enduring political, economic, and security costs on the Chinese state, and in turn would shape Beijing’s own domestic politics and its international standing for decades. China’s challenge is nothing less than the full transformation of the structure and identity of a society and a people that see the Chinese Communist Party largely as an antagonistic entity.
According to a recent Mainland Affairs Council opinion poll, a definitive Taiwanese tracking survey, about 7 percent of adults — equivalent to approximately 1.3 million people — support an immediate declaration of independence. A greater number support permanent separation from the mainland without a formal declaration of independence. Under Beijing’s rule, anyone who maintained these positions would risk jail. Many hundreds of thousands could be deprived of voting rights. All would likely be excluded from the civil service at all levels of government.
Using the metric of party identification, the number of people whose political freedoms would be directly threatened is even higher. About a third of Taiwanese voters identify as supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Chinese Communist Party considers to be an incubator — if not a promoter — of anti-Beijing sentiment. That equates to about 6.5 million people. The bureaucracy, along with lawyers, journalists, civil society activists, and even business leaders, would have to display loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party at the risk of losing their jobs or being sent to prison.
Lest anyone doubt that Beijing has an appetite for such monumental repression, there is an example close at hand. From 2017, acting on orders from General Secretary Xi Jinping, the authorities in Xinjiang put as many as one million Uyghur, Kazakh, and members of other Central Asian ethnic groups into prisons and internment camps, where they “underwent indoctrination aimed at turning them into secular, patriotic supporters of the party.” The region was placed under blanket surveillance, and children removed from their families were sent to special boarding schools.
Inside China, some analysts are grappling with this reality. Over the past decade, Chinese scholars, legal experts, and policy researchers have shifted their focus to the problem of post-unification rule. With greater urgency and specificity, Taiwan is framed as an acute governance challenge involving regime security, institutional control, identity transformation, and the management of long-term resistance under conditions of intense international scrutiny. While the use or threat of force remains central to Beijing’s Taiwan strategy, Chinese authors emphasize institutional sequencing, legal architecture, and sustained political integration.
The Chinese have extensive experience in bringing restive peripheral regions under control, in Xinjiang but also in Tibet and more recently Hong Kong. “Though its officials would never use the term,” in the words of a 2026 U.S. Department of Defense report, “the [Chinese Communist Party] has achieved what it considers unbroken success in its prior ‘occupations.’” At the same time, Chinese writings on Taiwan reveal persistent anxieties about legitimacy and capacity, and the long-term sustainability of rule over a society that has developed outside of China’s political orbit for more than seven decades.
The Chinese Communist Party has extensive experience governing societies in which it arrived as an alien ruling power. From the 1950s onwards, the party imposed distinct models on Xinjiang and Tibet, which are both nominally “autonomous” regions, steadily erasing whatever administrative or cultural differences once existed. More recently, Beijing has accelerated Hong Kong’s integration into the mainland’s system. Through lawfare, intimidation, the jailing of political opponents, and institutional penetration and co-optation, China has dismantled democratic politics, constrained independent courts, hollowed out civil society, and brought religious institutions under tighter Chinese Communist Party control. The promise of “One Country, Two Systems,” once presented as a durable model for the first 50 years of Hong Kong’s post-1997 handover, now functions primarily as a transitional slogan.
Taiwan would present a challenge of a far greater order. The island has been independently governed since the 1940s and a thriving democracy since the mid-1990s, but its resistance to outside rule predates modern politics. Spanish and Dutch colonial projects failed, and the Qing dynasty faced recurrent uprisings. Japanese colonial rule (1895 to 1945) brought modernization but also persistent resistance, often suppressed violently. The Kuomintang’s post-1945 takeover followed the same pattern: authoritarian consolidation, bloody crackdowns, and the suppression of rivals.
Since political liberalization began in the mid-1980s, Taiwan has developed into a functioning liberal democracy. Power changes hands through elections; legislatures and local governments matter; protest is normalized; courts are more independent; civil society is entrenched; private firms operate under law rather than bureaucratic fiat; and the military has been depoliticized into a national institution rather than a party army.
These political changes have been accompanied by a deepening sense of Taiwanese identity. Despite Beijing’s claims of timeless “Chineseness,” identification with Taiwan has strengthened over recent decades and is now embedded in democratic institutions and party competition. Identity divergence is not incidental — rather, it is structural. In short, modern Taiwan’s defining features are fundamentally incompatible with the Chinese Communist Party’s illiberal, Leninist governing model.
A military victory by the People’s Liberation Army could conceivably shatter resistance and allow Beijing to impose control. But it is at least as likely that China would confront a prolonged struggle to govern a society that views it as an occupying power.
Over the past decade, Beijing’s framing of the Taiwan question has undergone a quiet but fundamental transformation. What was once presented primarily as a project of “peaceful unification” under a flexible institutional arrangement has increasingly been reframed as a task of “complete national unity.”
In China’s academic and policy-adjacent literature, Taiwan is now treated less as a territory awaiting institutional accommodation and more as a politically complex, ideologically contested society whose incorporation would pose acute risks to regime security. As a result, governance, rather than negotiation, has moved to the center of Beijing’s strategic thinking.
For much of the post-Cold War period, Beijing’s preferred framing of the Taiwan question rested on the twin formula of “peaceful unification” and “One Country, Two Systems.” In the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s ascension to power, the then-Chinese leader offered Taiwan a deal: it could keep its governing, economic, and social systems and even its military, as long as Taipei acknowledged it was part of the People’s Republic of China.
In recent years, however, this relatively more tolerant language has been progressively discarded and replaced with an emphasis on “the complete unification of the motherland,” decisively altering the hierarchy of priorities and significantly limiting the scope of autonomy for Taipei. The emphasis on “complete” unification signals that acceptable outcomes must fully eliminate Taiwan’s separate political identity rather than merely managing it.
Beijing’s policy had often assumed that identity differences between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China were either superficial or malleable, and that economic integration and people-to-people exchanges would gradually soften resistance. Contemporary scholarship is more pessimistic. Many Chinese analysts now accept that decades of separation have produced a distinct identity in Taiwan that is explicitly tied to democratic self-rule and opposition to authoritarian governance. Identity divergence is thus no longer a secondary problem to be addressed after unification, but a central obstacle that must be confronted directly through force, re-education, and long-term social transformation.
In the aggregate, these shifts mark a move away from an accommodationist logic towards a more directly absorptive one.
In Chinese scholarly writing, the models for taking Taiwan come in a cacophony of forms. There is “peaceful reunification,” “military reunification,” “forced reunification,” “governance-led reunification,” “negotiated reunification,” “smart or strategic reunification,” “integration-led reunification,” “combined reunification,” and so on. The five most discussed forms are the peaceful, military, forced, governance-led, and smart reunification models.
The most discussed — and politically salient — analogy is Crimea. Russia’s 2014 annexation is often presented as a model of successful territorial seizure by a Beijing-friendly power, offering lessons not only in conquest but also in post-conflict governance. In this telling, Crimea shows how Moscow blurred the line between civilians and combatants, relied on sympathetic local populations, and moved quickly from occupation to political consolidation. Taiwan, however, would not offer Beijing a receptive public, and its distinct democratic identity would likely outweigh any appeal to shared ethnicity. Crimea’s main appeal, then, is that it was taken and secured rapidly, much as Beijing would hope to do in Taiwan.
Chinese scholars increasingly acknowledge that stability achieved through coercion does not equate to legitimacy. Compliance can be enforced, but acceptance cannot. A society may be quiet yet politically alienated; orderly yet psychologically resistant. This distinction is central to Beijing’s concerns about Taiwan, where separate identities are deeply rooted over generations.
Post-unification governance, as envisioned in Chinese literature, is not light touch. It requires permanent security presence, extensive surveillance, continuous political vetting, institutional oversight, and active identity management. These measures demand resources, coordination, and bureaucratic capacity over decades. They also require sustained political attention at the center. Applied to Taiwan, this raises the possibility of long-term stagnation rather than integration.
Beijing increasingly understands the scale and complexity of the challenge it would face and yet remains bound by political and ideological constraints that limit its ability to resolve core tensions. Autonomy is necessary but untrustworthy; control is effective but corrosive; stability is achievable, but legitimacy remains elusive. Any success would be costly, contested, and uncertain over the long term. At worst, there could be a total breakdown of civil and political order.
In this sense, the hardest problem for Beijing is not in taking Taiwan but in governing it. Whether the Chinese Communist Party can reconcile the demands of control with the need for legitimacy remains the central unanswered question in its Taiwan strategy.
The same question should also inform Western support for Taiwan. Sales of military equipment to strengthen Taiwan’s ability to defend itself remain fundamental to its survival as a self-governing entity. Equally, the United States and its allies have an interest in strengthening precisely the kinds of democratic institutions and qualities that make Taiwan difficult for Beijing to swallow. Reinforcing Taiwan’s democracy should take center stage as much as bolstering its military. The country’s survival depends on it.
Jude Blanchette is the Distinguished Tang Chair in China Research and director of the RAND China Research Center.
Richard McGregor is a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute.
Image: Achabonn via Wikimedia Commons
