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Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his recent New Year’s address to the Chinese people that “reunification” with Taiwan is “inevitable.” His remarks follow years of increasingly provocative Chinese actions against Taiwan, as well as against other nations in the region, including U.S. allies like the Philippines. International observers have long debated the likelihood and the expected timeline of a prospective Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In the wake of Xi Jinping’s latest comments, those debates might carry a renewed sense of urgency.
Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich outlines the reasoning behind Xi Jinping’s New Year’s comments on Taiwan and then discusses the likelihood of a prospective Chinese invasion of the island. Gingrich indicates that Xi Jinping’s comments are at least as much a product of domestic Chinese concerns as they are of any Chinese military interests.
We should all take very seriously Secretary-General Xi Jinping’s New Year’s Day speech to the Chinese people, in which, speaking from the equivalent of the Oval Office, he promised the Chinese people that Taiwan would be reabsorbed into China as their 19th province.
The reason we should take it seriously is that he’s now faced with growing problems and no solutions. It turned out that the effort he made to clean up corruption degenerated into an effort to clean up his political opponents. And he’s been purging people right and left, including in the military.
Also turned out that the Chinese One Child policy, which had been an effort to control population growth by literally limiting families to one child–it backfired. And all of a sudden, they’re faced with the reality that if you think about it, if two people have one child, that means that you now have an aging pyramid, in which there are always more people getting older than there are people available to work and take care of them. That has been compounded because, when they realized what a demographic disaster they were building, with fewer and fewer workers and more and more retirees, they tried to change it into a pro-child, pro-growth policy. And the women of China have rejected it.
