China hopes that the United States will see the Taiwan problem as a civil conflict in which American interests do not justify the risk of war. During the 1980s, China calculated that as long as it could slow down Taiwan's drift towards independence, and keep it isolated, Beijing would gain greater leverage over Taiwan as China's power and reach grew. Then China could quietly absorb the renegade province. Resort to force would put at risk China's wider interests in a peaceful international environment conducive to both economic development and military modernization.
As long as the United States and China remained allies of convenience in the latter stages of the Cold War, the Taiwan issue remained quiescent. Now the two countries are on a collision course on Taiwan. Does the United States have the ability and the will to help defend Taiwan? If not, sooner or later China will take it by force or threat.
Since the end of the Cold War, Taiwan's de facto independence, increasing sense of separate identity, and maturing democracy have all presented an affront to China's new strategic latitude and growing sense of self-regard. Increasing economic interdependence with the mainland has not been conducive to reintegration. The more the Taiwanese people travel in China, it seems, the less they like what they see. Now not even a democratic China might seem attractive to Taiwan. A China growing more repressive is even less appealing. China faces the prospect that Taiwan is spinning out of its control.
America has no treaty obligations to Taiwan, and does not want Taiwan to bank on its support if Taiwan were to provoke China with a unilateral declaration of independence. But the United States has never agreed that China has the right to bring Taiwan to heel by force or threat. Congress is currently reminding China of that long-standing US policy, and not just because of Taiwan's well-funded lobbying in Washington.
Taiwan is a newly minted democracy, the first democracy in the long history of the Chinese people, and is a former ward of the United States. For all these reasons, Taiwan has a much greater purchase on US interests than when it was run by the old Chiang Kai-shek gang. China does not seem to understand this. Beijing is convinced that the United States wants to keep China weak and divided―no doubt because that's how China would behave if it had the economic and military power which America now possesses. Most of Asia also believes that the US seeks to keep China down. (In fact, the US vision for China has always been as a responsible member of a great power condominium. That was why Franklin Roosevelt offered China a place at the top table at the end of the Second World War, even though China was weak at the time.)
