Is China’s plan to invade Taiwan inevitable?

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Speaker 4 Jules and Jez here, and every week on Not Stupid, we chat about the news in your feeds.

Speaker 1 So, there was a study done in the UK last year. It was a poll of 2,000 cat and dog owners, and one-third of them said they would rather talk to their pets than actual people.

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Speaker 1 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people.

Speaker 1 Do you remember in the late 90s when there was a very, very brief Diablo craze?

Speaker 1 I got on board the craze and got my parents to buy me a Yoho Diablo. It came with a CD-ROM teaching you how to do various tricks.

Speaker 1 I quickly realised that it's actually very hard to learn to do any tricks at all on the Diablo and I gave up. I figured that time could be better spent learning something much cooler.

Speaker 1 But some people did stick with it, like this guy.

Speaker 1 This is Liu Jishan, a former Taiwanese Diablo champion who has traveled the world performing and coaching Diablo.

Speaker 1 Now, if you're skeptical that someone can afford to live a high-flying international lifestyle by being a Diablo coach, then your skepticism is actually entirely warranted.

Speaker 6 The Taipei District Court has sentenced a Taiwanese Diablo coach convicted of spying for China to over a decade in prison. Liu Ji Xian pleaded guilty to accepting some 195,000 US dollars from China.

Speaker 1 A spy whose special skill is Diablo, Agent Diablo 7, you might say.

Speaker 6 He used that money to lure Taiwanese military personnel and other nationals into a spy ring tasked with leaking military secrets to Chinese organizations in Taiwan.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is a creative strategy, and it's not the only one. In the past, they've recruited through dating apps and loan shark schemes.

Speaker 1 An illegal bank targeting financially vulnerable soldiers for loans. They've paid Taiwanese influencers to spread propaganda and have apparently infiltrated the president's office.

Speaker 7 Recent high-profile cases include staffers Wang Renbing and Wu Wu Shang Yu within the presidential office.

Speaker 1 And experts say this is just the tip of the iceberg, with one former intelligence boss estimating more than 5,000 Chinese spies are operating in Taiwan.

Speaker 1 The number of spies caught is increasing every year. Many of Taiwan's allies are concerned that Beijing may invade as soon as 2027.

Speaker 1 Chinese President Xi has said this.

Speaker 1 We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and with the greatest effort.

Speaker 1 However, we are not committed to abandoning the use of force.

Speaker 1 While we won't rule out force, we'd prefer peaceful unification.

Speaker 1 So what's their plan for that? How do you peacefully take control of a country that doesn't want to be taken? I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Speaker 1 There's a legendary story in China about how the Chinese Communist Party took control of the city of Beijing, and it takes place during the Chinese Civil War.

Speaker 8 By late 1948, American observers say the Communists are capable of achieving a complete military victory over the nationalists.

Speaker 1 I'm going to tell you this story, but I do need to warn you that this is all from the Communist Party's perspective.

Speaker 1 We're going to use Chinese state media vision and audio, which ordinarily we would not do.

Speaker 1 But the purpose of this is to explain what the Communist Party thinks happened, because they want to make it happen again in Taiwan. Okay, hang on a tick, let me get the mood right.

Speaker 1 Adair, can I have some communist music?

Speaker 1 That's more like it. It was a people's war, in every sense.

Speaker 1 It's winter 1948 and the Communist People's Liberation Army or PLA is on the march. The American aligned nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were retreating.

Speaker 1 Many found themselves trapped inside the walls of the city that we now call Beijing, but back then it was called Bei Ping.

Speaker 1 At this time in Beijing, the more than 200,000 soldiers under Fu Zuoyi's command were surrounded by close on a million PLA soldiers.

Speaker 1 Beijing hadn't been the capital of China for 20 years, but it was still the home of many of the country's most significant historical sites, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and many of China's most prestigious universities.

Speaker 1 Because of its cultural significance, the Communists didn't want to see the city destroyed, but they also obviously wanted to get rid of the nationalist troops. So they tried to talk it out.

Speaker 1 To save the century-old capital from the ravages of war, the PLA initiated a negotiation with Fu Zuoyi. But the nationalist commander Fu didn't want to talk it out.
So the PLA settled in for a siege.

Speaker 1 Winters in this part of China are brutal with icy north winds blowing straight from Siberia. And at the time, Beijing was reliant on coal for heating.

Speaker 1 That coal came in on trains, which the PLA stopped letting through.

Speaker 1 Outside the city walls, the communist forces conducted military exercises just to show off how badly the troops inside were outnumbered.

Speaker 1 But Fu's daughter Fu Dongju was able to get through the blockade in order to visit her father.

Speaker 1 She later said that her father's main priorities were to preserve the city and keep his men alive. She remembers her father pacing around each night talking to her about his various options.

Speaker 1 She tried to convince him to surrender, which he eventually did after a month under siege. Suoy Yi finally accepted the PLA's conditions, leading his troops out of the city for rectification.

Speaker 1 In the end, Bei Ping was peacefully liberated.

Speaker 1 Now, one little fact about Fu's daughter that might be relevant here. Fu Dongju was a clandestine member of the Communist Party.
Yeah, so his daughter was a spy.

Speaker 1 One of several that infiltrated Fu's inner circle. He never really stood a chance.

Speaker 1 On February 3rd, the PLA held a victory parade in Beijing. The city was taken without firing a shot.

Speaker 1 It was a pivotal moment in the civil war and it was a strategy repeated multiple times as Mao Zedong's PLA swept through the country.

Speaker 1 So this whole process of building a network of collaborators inside a city, parading your massive military around in front of the people you're trying to conquer, dialing up the propaganda and then eventually negotiating a surrender, all without firing a shot, came to be known as the Bei Ping method, a name coined by Mao himself.

Speaker 1 Now, this strategy wasn't entirely as peaceful as Mao led people to believe, but hey, who needs facts when you control the media?

Speaker 1 Okay, I've started questioning the Communist Party line, so it's probably time to ditch the soundtrack. Adair?

Speaker 1 That's better. Okay, a few months after the victory, Mao was in Beijing to announce the beginning of a new era.

Speaker 8 October 1st, 1949. In Bei Ping, Mao Zedong inaugurates the so-called Chinese People's Republic.

Speaker 1 The nationalists were forced to flee into exile on the island of Taiwan, where they created a military dictatorship and implemented martial law.

Speaker 9 In March this year, the ruling Kuomintang Party at its party congress re-elected Chiang Kai-shek, the 81-year-old president, as its director general.

Speaker 1 Taiwan's president-slash-military dictator Chiang promised until his his dying day that he would retake the mainland.

Speaker 9 Chiang Kai-shek still does not let up on the return to the mainland theme.

Speaker 1 For decades there was a strange stalemate. Both sides wanted the reunification of China.

Speaker 9 The unification of China is the common aspiration for all Chinese, including the Chinese people here on Taiwan.

Speaker 1 Both the nationalists and the communists wanted to be in charge of both Taiwan and China, but neither side wanted to relinquish their own territory.

Speaker 9 The big obstacle for the unification is not the people here refused to unite with men in China. The big obstacle is communism.
We do not want to give up our way of life.

Speaker 1 In Taiwan, the nationalists did their best to dial up the patriotic fervor.

Speaker 9 The Republic of China on Taiwan celebrates its National Day with defiant rattom at hand.

Speaker 1 And on the mainland, the Communists return serve.

Speaker 9 A half million people took part in one way way or another, stretching across Tiananmen Square and the wide avenue that runs through it.

Speaker 1 Publicly, both sides paraded their military might, but privately, neither felt like they had the strength to defeat the other side by force alone.

Speaker 1 So the communists tried to undermine the nationalists and the nationalists tried to undermine the communists.

Speaker 9 The emphasis these days is more on fomenting internal political unrest against the communists than attempting any military confrontation.

Speaker 1 By the early 90s, the attitude of both sides was that they would very much prefer that the other team just accepted that their ideology was wrong and surrendered.

Speaker 1 Around 20% of Taiwanese people favoured reunification with China at some point in the future. Only 11% favoured declaring independence.

Speaker 1 Reunification with China would mean becoming a communist, but declaring independence would mean giving up on ever going home. There was a very large don't know yet response from the public.

Speaker 1 They wanted to see how each regime developed before making a final call. So, how did each regime develop? Well, Taiwanese people are now among the wealthiest in Asia.

Speaker 1 They have a vibrant, healthy, and let's say passionate democracy. Very proud.
We choose our own

Speaker 1 president. We are the light of the world.
We love freedom. We love democracy.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, GDP per capita has increased by 3,300%

Speaker 1 in 35 years in an unprecedented period of economic growth. So things are looking pretty good there too.

Speaker 1 And yet over the last two decades, Taiwanese support for reunification with the mainland has collapsed to 6%.

Speaker 1 That's not to say that most people want independence.

Speaker 1 Most people seem to just want things to stay the way they are, neither part of China nor not part of China, like if Schrödinger's cat was a country.

Speaker 1 But despite the majority of the Taiwanese population being happy with the status quo, over on the mainland, the Chinese president Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that peaceful reunification is coming.

Speaker 1 He says reunification through a peaceful manner is the most in line with the overall interest of the Chinese nation, including Taiwanese compatriots.

Speaker 1 Those who forget their heritage, betray the motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end, and they will be spurned by the people and condemned by history.

Speaker 1 So, how do you peacefully absorb an island that doesn't want to be absorbed at all?

Speaker 1 Well, remember the so-called peaceful liberation of of Bei Ping?

Speaker 3 This idea kept coming up in my conversations. People kept saying, just look at the Bei Ping model, Bei Ping model, that's what China wants to do.

Speaker 9 If you could achieve something like Beijing in 49, where you have

Speaker 1 what would be tantamount to a turnover, parading your military around, building a network of collaborators and dialing up the propaganda, it all worked to seize Beijing without violence, so why couldn't it work again?

Speaker 1 Well, let's start with the parading your massive military around part.

Speaker 11 For 20 years, China has been building a military force designed specifically to retake Taiwan.

Speaker 1 Nowadays, China's military spending is 20 times larger than Taiwan's, and they want to make sure that Taiwan knows about it.

Speaker 3 China is staging military exercises off Taiwan's north, south and east coasts.

Speaker 1 If you count the fact that the mainland is off the west coast, that's... all of Taiwan's coasts.
Taiwan is literally girt by Xi.

Speaker 3 Eastern Theatre Command says it's deployed ships, aircraft, and artillery to practice blockading the island.

Speaker 1 And China's been doing this pretty much constantly over the last few years.

Speaker 2 Dozens of Chinese fighter aircraft have flown sorties into what Taiwan claims as its air defense identification zone, prompting the tiny democratic island to scramble its own military and plead for international support.

Speaker 1 The frequency of Chinese aircraft buzzing past and missiles flying over is high enough that it's almost always in the news there.

Speaker 1 China's military fired missiles over and near the island and has since normalised its jets and warships passing closer than ever before. On top of that, there are frequent air raid drills.

Speaker 12 The air raid sirens are going off and I'm getting emergency alerts on my phone.

Speaker 1 When that happens, citizens have to head to bomb shelters or face a fine.

Speaker 12 The fines start at the equivalent of about $1,500 Australian dollars.

Speaker 13 We are seeing the Taiwanese population, certainly in the polling, become more concerned about China's actions.

Speaker 1 All these military provocations by China are basically the equivalent of marching the troops around the walls of Beijing.

Speaker 1 So that's the way the military behaviour is similar, but what about the way China uses propaganda?

Speaker 1 Well, the PLA certainly has no shortage of slick video footage of their troops, ships, jets, and rockets in action. They also have no hesitation resorting to intimidation and threats.

Speaker 3 In a video accompanying its announcement, it called Taiwan's president a parasite and depicted him as a green bug held by chopsticks over a burning Taiwan.

Speaker 13 Some of this propaganda that China is releasing shows cartoons of missile strikes in downtown Taiwan and things like that. It is incredibly aggressive.

Speaker 1 Now, this propaganda feels pretty obvious, but there are more subtle efforts to win over Taiwanese hearts and minds as well.

Speaker 1 If you have a look at the map of the region, you'll see that the mainland province directly across the strait from Taiwan is Fujian province.

Speaker 1 For several years, the Fujian government has been funding a number of media outlets aimed at highlighting the cultural connections between Taiwan and the mainland.

Speaker 1 There's a film and TV awards night every year that celebrates cross-strait production.

Speaker 1 A film and television talent on both sides of the Taiwan Straits can work together. I am happy that our TV drama is so popular in Taiwan.
We're jointly working in many aspects.

Speaker 1 The Fujian government also produces news programs about Taiwan that are broadcast on satellite TV and posted online.

Speaker 1 There are also efforts to spread fake news, with websites set up that look like American news outlets but post disinformation about Taiwanese politicians.

Speaker 1 There are allegations that some Taiwanese social media influences are being paid by Chinese backers to spread disinformation even further.

Speaker 1 In 2024, Taiwan says they detected more than 2 million pieces of mainland-backed disinformation, a 60% increase from the previous year.

Speaker 1 So that's the military and propaganda elements of the Bei Ping method covered, which leaves one final element, mass infiltration by spies.

Speaker 1 Well, we heard earlier about Diabolo 7, who was passing military secrets to Beijing. And that's pretty standard espionage, apart from the Diabolo coach bit.

Speaker 1 But the Chinese government is also pursuing more original methods of infiltration.

Speaker 5 Prosecutors are seeking a 12-year sentence for an army officer who promised to surrender to Beijing in the event of a Chinese invasion.

Speaker 1 Taiwanese army officers have been paid to film themselves promising to surrender if there's an invasion.

Speaker 5 Xiang had photographed himself in uniform holding a written pledge of surrender. By the time he was exposed, he had served in the army for 35 years.

Speaker 1 A 35-year career thrown away for, well, how much?

Speaker 5 By January of this year, he had received nearly 18,000 US dollars.

Speaker 1 Right, so enough for a new Toyota hatchback. But they're not just targeting the Army.

Speaker 10 Recently, there have been reports of web pages and apps that allow Taiwanese people to pledge their loyalty to China.

Speaker 10 Screenshots and videos of two in particular have turned up on different social media platforms.

Speaker 10 One app called Return Home allegedly claims to allow Taiwanese people to surrender to China with one click.

Speaker 1 Well, that's that's convenient. A surrender button.

Speaker 10 Taiwan is particularly sensitive to this kind of news at a time when its government says China has been increasing its intimidation and influence tactics against Taiwan.

Speaker 1 The aim of all this is obviously to demoralise people, to get them so terrified about the inevitability of a Chinese invasion that they just give up.

Speaker 1 Like Fu Zhu Yi, the nationalist commander in Beijing with the Communist Daughter. But is it working?

Speaker 12 Reading the news in Australia, you might think think there's a constant sense of panic here in Taiwan. But really, everyday life is very normal.

Speaker 1 Polling indicates that so far, no, it does not appear to be working.

Speaker 1 The Democratic Progressive Party, the DPP, which opposes being absorbed by Communist China, continues to perform very well in elections.

Speaker 1 The guy Beijing calls a parasite in their propaganda videos won last year's presidential election with a big margin.

Speaker 1 The prospects of a majority of Taiwanese people deciding to press that surrender button seem pretty remote.

Speaker 14 It's just unimaginable that the people of Taiwan would ever accept the kinds of policies that Beijing would try and implement.

Speaker 1 So what happens if they don't?

Speaker 1 Well, obviously, it's very difficult to say. A lot of people would argue that China would easily beat Taiwan if it came to a full-scale war.

Speaker 1 But then again, a lot of people, including me, thought that Russia would easily beat Ukraine in a full-scale war, and it turns out that all of us were wrong.

Speaker 1 Other experts argue that invading Taiwan would contradict Beijing's own propaganda line.

Speaker 1 They've been telling the Chinese people for years that the true desire of the Taiwanese people is to reunify with the mainland.

Speaker 14 They're kind of ideologically trapped.

Speaker 14 There is this idea that if unification represents the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, then you shouldn't need to fight the people you're trying to unify with in order to achieve that.

Speaker 14 The Taiwanese should want to come back to the motherland,

Speaker 14 and China just needs to wait and they will.

Speaker 1 What's certain is that if the Taiwanese people do put up a fight, it would be a very unpleasant experience for Beijing.

Speaker 1 Taiwan is an extremely well-armed and very mountainous island which has been preparing for invasion for nearly 80 years.

Speaker 1 On top of that, it seems increasingly likely that Taiwan would be supported by several larger and more powerful allies.

Speaker 13 A lot of people think about this rhetoric towards Taiwan of, you know, if an invasion happens, it really only is an issue for Taiwan, China, and maybe the US, but that isn't true.

Speaker 13 An invasion of Taiwan, if China was to make that decision, would involve a much wider Indo-Pacific conflict, which Australia would inevitably be involved in.

Speaker 1 The new Japanese Prime Minister, Sanei Takaichi, said in her first official address that she may deploy her military to support Taiwan if China was to attack.

Speaker 1 The US President Donald Trump told 60 Minutes that Xi Jinping won't dare invade Taiwan while he's in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 He has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, we would never do anything while President Trump is president

Speaker 1 because they know the consequences. He did not outline what those consequences would be.
But he'd best come up with some soon because official U.S.

Speaker 1 intelligence briefings have suggested that Xi wants the Chinese military to be ready to force reunification by 2027. peacefully or otherwise.

Speaker 1 He's promised the reunification of China is inevitable and he's not someone who likes backing down on his promises.

Speaker 1 Making such a big deal about how important Taiwan is means anything short of full unification would be seen as a catastrophic failure. Nobody in any country wants there to be a war in Taiwan.

Speaker 1 The question is whether someone will decide that it's necessary.

Speaker 1 This episode of If You're Listening was written by producer Adair Shepard and me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.
I'll see you, Chu's Tay.