Last week, while many China experts inside and outside the Clinton administration were confidently predicting that China would not escalate the conflict with Taiwan, we warned that Beijing might well be contemplating an attack. This turned out to be correct. According to the Washington Post and New York Times, Chinese officials have been trying to gauge Washington’s reaction to a possible Chinese attack on one of Taiwan’s offshore islands.

Now, the conventional wisdom is that China won’t launch such an attack for several months. According to the new logic of the China experts, President Jiang Zemin won’t want to initiate a conflict before his scheduled meeting with President Clinton in the middle of September. Then China is holding a giant party for over 300 American CEOs in Shanghai later in September. Then on October 1, China will be staging a mammoth celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Communist party’s victory. The same China experts who told us China would not escalate the conflict are now telling us that they won’t want to do so until these events are out of the way.