China has just concluded its Fourth Plenum, a key meeting for the country’s ruling Communist Party. Several top apparatchiks were purged, prompting speculation that China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, might be next. And with Xi gone, the thinking goes, the threat of both a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and a possible war with the United States might disappear.
Even if this is true — a big stretch — the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party is far bigger than Xi.
The Fourth Plenum began on Monday and spanned four days. The meeting was closed-door, but some details have emerged. No fewer than eight generals were purged, and at least 11 full members of the party’s powerful Central Committee were replaced. As Reuters noted, it was the highest personnel turnover since 2017. The moves sparked conjecture that Xi might be on his way out. Xi has been president since 2012. In 2023, he was chosen by the party to serve an unprecedented third term. He’s the most powerful CCP leader since the regime’s founder, Mao Zedong, who died nearly half a century ago. And the China he rules is vastly more powerful than the impoverished nation of Mao’s era.
China’s military and economic power dwarfs that of previous U.S. opponents, including Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. And worse still, key aspects of the American economy and industrial base are reliant on China, providing Beijing with tremendous leverage. A Sino-American war would be the most devastating conflict since World War II — if not ever. And war clouds are gathering.
Xi has called for his country’s People’s Liberation Army to be able to invade Taiwan by 2027. And he has undertaken numerous steps — boosting military spending to unseen heights, hoarding grain and oil, building underground hospitals, and fortifying bases — to that end.
Xi’s assertiveness and the cult of personality that he has developed have encouraged some commentators to see the Chinese ruler as being the source of a possible invasion of Taiwan and a possible war with the U.S. But he’s not.
In fact, the CCP coveted Taiwan since the regime won the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Mere weeks after the fall of Shanghai, Mao ordered PLA commanders to “pay attention to the problem of seizing Taiwan immediately.” At the time, China hadn’t begun to recover from the invasion of the Japanese empire, let alone a decadeslong civil war. But even with millions dead, Mao and his CCP had already set their sights on Taiwan, then known as Formosa.
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The CCP’s desire to seize and, in their words, “reunify” the island led to two separate crises with the U.S. — one of which abated only after then-President Dwight Eisenhower implied that he was willing to use nuclear weapons. And it remained a sticking point years later when then-President Richard Nixon reached out to the Middle Kingdom. In 1996, China again openly menaced Taiwan, sparking a response from the Clinton administration. At the time, Xi was but a mid-level figure in Fujian Province, far from the party’s power center.
More broadly, history tells us that rising revisionist powers often challenge the status quo power for supremacy. Beijing seeks to supplant the U.S. as the world’s dominant power. Xi may see himself as China’s “man of destiny,” positioned to create a “Chinese century.” But such ambitions were there long before him and will be there long after he’s gone. Unless, of course, Xi decides to roll the dice and upend the world as we know it.
The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
