Kevin Rudd is Australia’s ambassador to the United States and was previously prime minister and foreign minister. This is an edited extract of a speech delivered Thursday at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. The speech is a personal reflection in his capacity as a China scholar and not as an official representative of the Australian government.
The central question for our time, if we are to avoid war across the Taiwan Strait, is to understand how Chinese President Xi Jinping actually interprets the deterrence strategies of the United States, Taiwan itself, and U.S. allies and strategic partners.
What strategy is China now embarking upon, short of preparation for an actual invasion, to achieve its political objectives in relation to Taiwan? And what is the role of deterrence in responding to such a strategy?
The key to understanding Beijing’s red line on Taiwan’s political status is China’s fear that Taiwan will become an independent state, and be recognized by the international community as such, thereby destroying the possibility of unification with the mainland.
This, in turn, is based on Beijing’s insistence that any political dialogue between Taiwan and the mainland must be based on the “1992 Consensus” — an ambiguous arrangement broadly based on the principle of “one China,” albeit with differing interpretations of what that means to each side.
Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in government since 2016, has opposed the “one China” element within the 1992 Consensus. As a result, Beijing has rejected all official dialogue with Taiwanese administrations since the party came to power. The DPP has argued that Taiwan was already independent and so had no need formally to declare it. President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president from 2016 to 2024, took this concept further — continuing to reject the 1992 Consensus, while refining the DemocraticProgressive Party’s position on Taiwan’s political status as one committed to “maintaining the status quo.” This position has been reiterated by the new DPP President William Lai who took office last month.
But Beijing is increasingly making it plain to foreign interlocutors that this stance is not sufficient. Far from being relieved that the DPP has stepped back from the brink of any formal declaration of independence, Beijing is signaling loud and clear that its political objective remains to force Taiwan into negotiations on its preferred “one country, two systems” model that it has used for Hong Kong.
Beijing might well be in the process of concluding that Taiwan thinking of itself as de facto autonomous, with the international community on much the same page, will become further entrenched — and irreversible. As time begins to run out (from China’s perspective), we will begin to see a change in Chinese strategy toward the “Taiwan problem.” Indeed, we are already seeing it, with China increasingly availing itself of a multidimensional “gray zone” strategy over the past 18 months or so, a strategy aimed at applying new forms of pressure on Taiwanese and international public opinion to force Taipei to the negotiating table.
Prominent analysts have described the gray zone strategy as seeking “economic, military, diplomatic, or political gains without eliciting a costly and direct response from an opponent.” Others have described it as a “short of war” approach — a combination of political, military, diplomatic, economic and cyber measures where the objective is to achieve a psychological, attitudinal and then behavioral change on the part of Taiwanese public and political opinion.
These measures include intensifying political assaults by Beijing to delegitimize Taiwanese political leaders opposed to unification. They also involve military assets: naval, air, coast guard and other intrusions across the median line, Taiwan’s 24-mile contiguous zone and in and around Taiwan’s offshore islands, are meant to show the Taiwanese that their administration is incapable of defending Taipei’s claims to sovereignty. They also entail punitive economic measures (well short of a blockade) aimed at impeding Taiwanese trade, investment and other national income, to demonstrate to apolitical Taiwanese voters Taipei’s vulnerability.
During her tenure, Tsai already pointed to mounting cyber intrusions into Taiwan’s economic and communications infrastructure, again with the intention of demonstrating to the Taiwanese people the acute vulnerability of their systems to an integrated cyberattack.
For China watchers, there are some similarities in Beijing’s “short of war” strategies that have already been tried in the South and East China Seas, and those being tried on Taiwan. Japan has seen this with the intensity of People’s Liberation Army Air Force sorties around Senkaku-Diaoyu Dao. We have also seen China assert nonlethal coercive actions in relation to the Second Thomas Shoal and the Philippines.
