Beijing Is Not Rushing Reunification

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China’s mainland has long insisted that the real threat to peace in the Taiwan Strait comes not from Beijing, but from “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and the external powers that support them, above all, the United States. Therefore, People’s Liberation Army exercises in and around the Strait are not preparations for war so much as deterrence against pro-independence moves on the island and foreign interference abroad.But that is not how Washington, many of America’s partners, or, admittedly, many people in Taiwan see it. They see the drills as rehearsals for coercion or invasion. In that view, the greatest threat to peace in the Taiwan Strait is the mainland itself: a rapidly growing and increasingly sophisticated military power that may be losing patience with the status quo.That fear has, over the past few years, come to crystallise around one number: 2027. The number traces back most famously to Adm. Philip Davidson’s March 2021 testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, when he warned that the threat over Taiwan could become manifest “in the next six years.” More recently, a Foreign Affairs essay argued that something had changed in Beijing’s thinking in 2025: this time, China not only speaks more insistently about “reunification,” but may also believe that a window of opportunity has opened that may not come again.I have long been sceptical of that line of argument. As I wrote in Foreign Policy this week, In a closed-door workshop in Hawaii in March on U.S.-China relations, an American participant asked a question that has now surfaced repeate…