China’s peace‑and‑force play
Beijing is pairing conciliatory outreach to Taiwan’s opposition with clear military signalling — reserving large blocks of airspace that Taipei worries could be a prelude to drills. (reuters.com) Taiwan’s officials say they “see only warships and warplanes” despite talk of reconciliation, and the outreach to figures like Andrew Hsia followed a meeting with Xi even as China has kept up multi‑day live‑fire exercises. (aljazeera.com)
While Xi Jinping was meeting Taiwan’s main opposition leader in Beijing on Friday, Taiwan’s government was watching Chinese ships and aircraft mass around the island and warning that reserved airspace could be the setup for more drills. (Reuters: ) (Al Monitor/Reuters: ) That is the play: offer talks to one side of Taiwan’s politics and pressure the island with the military at the same time. Taiwan’s officials said that, from Taipei’s view, they “see only warships and warplanes,” not the peace Beijing says it wants. (Reuters: ) (Straits Times/Reuters: ) The opposition party in this story is the Kuomintang, the party that ruled China before losing the civil war to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and retreating to Taiwan. That history matters because Beijing has long treated the Kuomintang as a possible channel for dealing with Taiwan even when it rejects Taiwan’s elected government. (AP: ) (NPR: ) On April 10, Xi met Kuomintang chair Cheng Li-wun at the Great Hall of the People, the first such meeting between leaders of the two parties in about a decade. Both sides used the language of peace, but Xi also repeated Beijing’s red line that Taiwan independence would not be tolerated. (AP: ) (New York Times: ) Cheng answered with talk of “reconciliation” and shared heritage, and Al Jazeera reported that she also suggested slowing Taiwan’s military build-up. That lands directly in Taiwan’s domestic fight over defense spending, where the ruling party wants more money for weapons and preparedness and the opposition has resisted some increases. (Al Jazeera: ) (Reuters: ) Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, comes from the Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing distrusts far more than the Kuomintang because it defends Taiwan’s separate political identity. So Beijing’s message is split in two: isolate Lai’s government, but keep a door open to Taiwanese politicians willing to talk on Beijing’s terms. (Council on Foreign Relations: ) (Reuters: ) The military side of the message is not abstract. Reuters reported that Taiwan’s security officials were tracking a rise in Chinese naval activity and worrying over large airspace reservation zones that could be used for exercises, while local reporting said China had also announced live-fire drills in the northern Yellow Sea this week. (Reuters: ) (Taipei Times: ) Taiwan has seen this pattern before. In late December 2025, China ran two days of live-fire exercises around Taiwan that it said simulated a blockade of key ports, and Taiwan answered with its own rapid-response drill. (CBS News: ) (Deutsche Welle: ) So the point of this week’s choreography is not just diplomacy and not just intimidation. It is to show Taiwanese voters that Beijing can reward politicians who talk about closer ties and raise the cost for a government that keeps hardening Taiwan’s defenses. (Reuters: ) (Al Jazeera: ) That leaves Taipei facing two clocks at once: an immediate military clock measured in ships, aircraft, and drill zones, and a slower political clock measured in budgets, elections, and which Taiwanese party gets to claim it can keep the peace. Beijing is trying to move both at once. (Reuters: ) (New York Times: )
