Beijing has tried for years to convince the world that Taiwan is its ultimate, sacred “core interest,” the one issue that eclipses everything else.
We are told that peace, trade, climate cooperation and even global stability all hinge on whether the world yields to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands over a small island of 23 million people. This fixation is not only imperious but also profoundly phony. History has seen this movie before.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler fixated the world’s attention on the Sudetenland, a small, German-speaking enclave within the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia. He framed it as Germany’s core grievance, wrapped in the language of history, ethnicity and national humiliation.
Britain and France bought the story. In Munich in 1938, they sold out Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace.
Of course, Sudetenland was never the endgame. It was the opening move. The result was not stability but a chain of aggression that plunged the world into catastrophe.
Today, the CCP wants us to believe Taiwan is China’s Sudetenland — the one issue that must be “resolved” at all costs. The parallels are unsettling. Like Hitler, Beijing insists that if only this one grievance were settled, then everything else would calm down. Also like Hitler, Beijing’s appetite extends far beyond a single territory.
China is simultaneously pressing claims against India, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Bhutan and others, both on land and at sea. Taiwan is not the only prey; it is the most useful distraction.
That distraction serves several purposes.
First, when cornered, the CCP changes the subject. By obsessively framing Taiwan as a “sovereignty issue,” Beijing tries to force the free world into a false debate: Is Taiwan part of China or not? This framing deliberately obscures the real issue: not cartography, but free capitalism versus communist control.
Taiwan is a functioning democracy facing down an authoritarian dictatorship. Reducing that struggle to an internal Chinese matter launders tyranny into normal diplomacy.
At the core of this Taiwan fixation is the CCP’s own act of cognitive deception: the false claim of “reunification.” China’s obsession with reunification rests on myths rather than historical or legal reality. Taiwan has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, making the language of “reuniting” inherently misleading.
Its political status as an independent and sovereign country is not a leftover from China’s civil war, nor the product of shared ethnicity or ancient history, but the result of Taiwan’s own democratic transformation since the late 1980s. Modern international law rejects historical nostalgia as a justification for annexation, and major U.S. policy frameworks, including the Three Communiques, do not recognize Taiwan as part of the PRC.
Beijing’s selective respect for borders, willingly ceding vast territories elsewhere while insisting Taiwan is nonnegotiable, reveals that ideology, not geography, drives its claims.
Second, the CCP’s fixation on Taiwan allows Beijing to dodge global responsibility. Whenever the world presses China to act constructively — on Iran, Russia, North Korea, global health, arms control, fentanyl, climate or maritime law — Chinese leaders filibuster with ritualistic lectures about Taiwan and the hollow incantation of the hackneyed “One China” principle.
The result is paralysis. Serious global problems go unaddressed while China escapes accountability for human rights abuses, COVID-19 obfuscation, massive carbon emissions, espionage, weaponized supply chains and predatory economic practices. By pretending it can talk only about Taiwan, Beijing ensures it talks about nothing else.
Third, the CCP’s obsession with Taiwan provides ideological cover for China’s military buildup. Beijing insists its rapidly expanding and modernizing military is focused on “reunification,” yet hardly any of its capabilities are designed solely for a Taiwan contingency. The People’s Liberation Army is being built to contest and, if necessary, defeat the free world across space, cyber, maritime and long-range strike domains.
Taiwan is not the strategic destination; it is the narrative justification for a far broader bid for regional, and ultimately global, military dominance.
Finally, this brings us to the deeper ideological driver that ties everything together. The CCP is a Marxist-Leninist regime that depends on permanent struggle to sustain itself. Such a system requires an external enemy and perpetual emergency, real or imagined, to maintain internal cohesion, justify repression and keep revolutionary fervor alive.
Casting Taiwan as the “unfinished mission” of the communist revolution conveniently serves this purpose. It allows the party to blame an alleged imperialist conspiracy, led by the United States, for a failure that has lingered since 1949. From Mao Zedong, to Deng Xiaoping, to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, every CCP leader has devoted to a constant and carefully calculated escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
This has included decades of artillery barrages on the Taiwan-held Quemoy and Matsu Islands since the mid-1950s, countless military provocations from missile firings to waters near Taiwan’s shores, to ritualistic round-the-island military intimidations of today. All aim to promote domestic unity and sustain the narrative of the CCP’s fighting vitality.
Seen in this light, Taiwan is not just a target; it is a tool. A tool to escape international responsibility, mobilize nationalism, suppress dissent, excuse militarization and sustain a revolutionary narrative that would otherwise collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
The CCP’s fixation on Taiwan is not the product of historical inevitability or national destiny, but rather a carefully cultivated obsession, one that tells us far more about the insecurities and phony moral solemnity of the regime than about the island it seeks to absorb.
If the world allows the CCP to take Taiwan, then the result will be a fatal trigger for a long chain of aggression that will engulf the world once again in a global conflagration, as happened after the betrayal in Munich in 1938.