Let’s be realistic … if counterintuitive. Despite the many illustrious commentators and foreign affairs specialists warning and worrying in the columns of newspapers, in my humble opinion, Chinese President Xi Jinping is not dumb enough to invade Taiwan, irrespective of how Russia fares in Ukraine. He is smart enough to know that keeping the sword threateningly hovering over Taiwan best serves the Communist Party’s geopolitical objectives as well as its domestic imperative.

The international community is tying itself in knots trying to second-guess China. There is a great deal of energy being devoted to preparing for an invasion, including special support measures for Taiwan, from military to political. The invasion threat is a form of control, like chucking Chinese firecrackers to create chaos. It keeps global attention on the threat, nerves jangling. This is an orchestrated threat, with the tension-building buzz of a string section sounding like a thousand bees, but never quite reaching the climax of the crescendo. It sells China as a hovering dragon, ‘Beware the Dragon!’

Domestically, the Chinese leadership uses the oft-repeated mantra of ‘reuniting’ Taiwan with mainland China as a kind of social glue, helping to fuse the people to the party. This is especially important at a time when there is a degree of unrest, thanks to bruises from the vicious Covid measures such as personal restrictions. But let us not assume that the entire Chinese population thinks as one on Taiwan.

A Shanghai resident writes on Quora:

I think people in any region of the world have the right to reject a government that is clearly oppressive. I don’t believe the lies of politicians in any country in the world, but I hope and believe in the rights of the people and democracy. But I still regard Taiwanese as compatriots, maybe we will be unified in the future, but we cannot be unified by the Communist Party.

A student of philosophy in China writes a long and thoughtful post, which includes this:

Maybe this will sound unfriendly, but I risk to say that if China is really a democratic country, and some important decisions can really be made by the people’s voting, trust me, the war against Taiwan, or shall we use the more precise description the Chinese people would use, ‘the liberation of Taiwan’, would have happened many many years ago. And according to my observation by far, most Chinese people know the price the war will cost and the possible harm it could do, but they still find it worthy. Talking to DEMOCRACY, like you always like to do, you can’t ignore 1.4 billion (or the majority of them) people’s wish when you try to separate their motherland.

Someone working in the University of Sydney has another take:

I am 29, a native mainlander. I think I am eligible to express the younger generation’s opinion. Almost every mainland residents think Taiwan is a part of China, Taiwanese are also Chinese. We share the same culture, the same language and the same ancestors. If you have traveled in both south-eastern China and Taiwan, you will find out there are no difference of people’s life in these two places.

However, if you confirm every mainlander would be angry when this belief is offered only depending on what I said, I am afraid you are totally wrong. For the new generation in mainland China, most of us do not care about how Taiwan is going so much. Because we care more about our living standard, our career and our children. Unlike our former generation , we think the life is much [more] important than any other things. Living or staying is politician’s stuff, neither ours nor average Taiwanese’s. Anyway, whether Taiwan comes back or leaves mainland China, average people take no benefit from that.

For us, raising salary is probably the most joyful news.

Obviously, three people’s comments are not fully representative of 1.4 billion people; it’s just a glimpse, but instructive, nonetheless.

As for the pragmatic reality of an invasion, the scenario is daunting, even for a major military power. So China invades Taiwan. It’s a big, bloody job – even without international intervention. The 23.6 million democratically governed Taiwanese do not have welcome mats out. The invasion force has to overcome well-armed and trained defence forces, arrest all members of Parliament, secure all arms depots, take control of transport, communication, and broadcast facilities, take control of police weapons, and fill the streets with military to control the well funded (and no doubt well prepared) resistance.

Simultaneously, the invaders face the massive task of locking down and ‘re-educating’ all the institutions and departments. Every bureaucrat is a potential covert agent, ready – nay, keen – to sabotage the invader. (Ask Donald Trump about the Deep State.)

The vast resources required to repair the medical and physical war damage and maintain a stranglehold on an occupied Taiwan would be highly challenging. It’s not like Hong Kong, with a craven political leadership, and population 7.5 million.

As senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Robert Kagan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

‘Xi may believe American power has declined dramatically but, as Putin has discovered, the contrary is true. The ability of the American-led order to defend itself is far greater than it was in the first half of the 20th century.’

International intervention would seriously challenge an invasion force. All it would take is a reverse blockade to surround the island with naval vessels from Taiwan-friendly nations. Would Chinese military attack US, UK, or Australian navy vessels?

Kagan makes a couple of other salient points:

‘For most of the past three decades governments in Beijing have hoped the people of Taiwan would gradually yield and agree to unification with the mainland. Instead, the Taiwanese have been able to defy Chinese pressure because of the support and commitments they receive from the US. The Chinese are bitter about this. They believe the “One China” policy, dating from the Nixon administration, was supposed to reduce American support for Taiwan to the point where the Taiwanese would feel they had to accept Beijing’s offer of union. Things have not turned out that way. Nazi Germany defeated France, the strongest land power in Europe at the time; China has not been able to compel a small, isolated island less than one-50th its size to knuckle under.

‘Even if the Chinese did succeed in forcing Taiwan to “reunite”, either by military assault or naval blockade, would China then be in a position to exercise hegemony across East Asia? Or might that be the beginning of the end for this Chinese regime? The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent destruction of American forces in The Philippines and the western Pacific were astonishing victories over the US, but they were also the beginning of the end for Imperial Japan. Beijing may well be able to take Taiwan, and the US, typically slow to prepare and respond, may not be able to prevent it. But what then?’

What then – politically; and what then pragmatically? Even after a successful invasion, Taiwan’s population would remain a determined, energised and innovative enemy; guerrilla warfare is exceedingly difficult to subdue by conventional force – as history has shown. An occupied Taiwan would be a permanent thorn in China’s side, its pride no less hurt by the unwilling prisoner-partner in their bed. China would have to try and turn Taiwan into a police state along the lines of … er … mainland China.

Xi may also be a student of Sun Tsu’s Art of War, which states that the worst possible strategy is to besiege walled cities. This is equally relevant to islands, I would have thought.

Most foreign governments, including Japan, pretend to accept the falsehood that Taiwan is a sovereign part of China – the ‘one China’ policy, to shamefully appease China. As if to atone for their weakness, however, Western governments insist that ‘reunification’ must take place without force, something that Beijing refuses to rule out – for reasons proposed at the beginning of this article. Who could blame the Taiwanese for thinking, ‘With friends like these, who needs enemies?’