Pelosi visit: What is China thinking?

A lot of people have written a lot of words about Nancy Pelosi’s possible upcoming visit to Taiwan. Many of these are very smart and well-informed people whose opinions I respect tremendously. However, there is one question that keeps eating away at me that almost no one is talking about: Is Xi Jinping in trouble?

Almost all the commentary has looked at the situation from the American point of view. Very little has thought much about the Chinese point of view. A lot of analysts have noted that China will make several important decisions about its leadership over the next few months, so this is a particularly sensitive time. Several have worried that Xi would find a Pelosi visit humiliating and might feel the need to act rashly. However, I have only read one column going much deeper into internal Chinese politics than that. These analysts also seem almost universally to assume that a third term for Xi Jinping is a foregone conclusion. Frankly speaking, it doesn’t quite add up to me.

Disclaimer: I am not a China specialist. I don’t know what is going on inside China.

Let me lay out a few basic assumptions that shape my thinking.

First, I assume that domestic power is Xi Jinping’s (and every other major Chinese actor’s) top priority right now. You have to secure power first before you can do anything else.

Second, Nancy Pelosi’s visit is not inherently worthy of a crisis. Members of Congress visit Taiwan all the time, and Pelosi does not have the power to decide American foreign policy. Arguably, the visits of cabinet-level figures over the past few years have been more significant than this visit. China could, if it wanted to, follow the normal script of issuing indignant complaints that everyone ignores. Instead, China has chosen to escalate the tension around this particular visit. I reiterate, this is a CHOICE.

Third, several well-informed American voices have argued that China is making threats about using force that seem more credible than normal. In many versions, this involves threatening the military plane carrying Pelosi; in others, it involves holding live fire exercises, sending fighters deeper into Taiwan’s airspace, or just ambiguous dire consequences. I am not in any position to dispute them. I’ll assume that China has, indeed, staked out a fairly extreme position, and the US military is quite concerned about Pelosi’s physical safety.

Fourth, China’s goal is to prevent Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. China has now invested quite a bit of political capital telling its domestic audience that it will not tolerate this visit. Its ideal outcome is that she will back down and cancel the visit.

Fifth, the chances that Pelosi will cancel the visit in the face of public Chinese pressure are pretty low. Once the visit became public, canceling it would have been a humiliating option for Pelosi. It also would give Republicans a powerful weapon to hammer Democrats with. China could get its preferred outcome, but it is highly likely that it will not. This is a risky bet for Xi and China.

Where does that leave us? China would seem to be faced with the choice of backing down or carrying through with its threats against Pelosi’s plane. Those are terrible options for the PRC. Backing down would be humiliating, but engaging would probably be worse. Pelosi will be flying on an American military plane, so threatening or attacking that plane would be directly confronting the American military. For China, this would be just about the worst way to get into a war with the USA.

China might be preparing for a war to take Taiwan, and it might assume that it will inevitably get into a military conflict with the USA. However, they should probably prefer to choose an advantageous time and place for that. Forcing down Pelosi’s plane wouldn’t gain them any Taiwanese territory. Instead, it would probably galvanize American public opinion against China and for a rapid military buildup. It could create a huge backlash against Chinese manufactured goods that would inflict severe pain on an already weak Chinese economy. That is, it would probably force the USA to prepare more aggressively, making it less likely that China would win any future war. Moreover, Chinese strategy on Taiwan has been predicated on persuading the USA to stay out of any conflict, or, failing that, to take Taiwan quickly before the US military has time to mobilize. By directly attacking a US military plane, they would be cutting Taiwan out of the equation and forcing the US to get involved. In addition, attacking a non-threatening transport plane is a pretty good way to ensure that international opinion is firmly against you. Oh, and let’s not forget that any moves against Pelosi’s plane might not be successful. The American military has been alerted to the danger, and it has its own forces that it can use to protect her plane. There is a real possibility that China could create all that backlash AND find out that its military isn’t as strong as it had hoped.

In short, there are a lot of ways that this could go very badly for China.

Let’s go back to Xi Jinping. According to most analysts, Xi is firmly on course to secure a third term. There are complaints about the economy, the Covid response, and several other things, but most people don’t seem to think that anyone is ready to make a serious challenge to Xi’s power. If this is an accurate description, Xi’s strategy should be to hold everything steady. If nothing big changes, he will win. They should downplay Pelosi’s visit as unimportant and insignificant, while issuing all the standard complaints about Chinese sovereignty and Taiwan separatists. If there is nothing to see here, then there is no humiliation for Xi or China. Xi’s Taiwan strategy is still on track, and Xi marches inevitably toward a third term.

Yet what is happening with the Pelosi trip is just the opposite. China is actively creating/escalating an international crisis in which there is a high probability that it will not obtain a good outcome. Effectively, China could be inviting everyone to see Xi and the current government as weak and ineffective. This is precisely the sort of thing that could derail Xi’s pursuit of a third term. Why would Xi allow China to pursue a strategy that has the potential to remove him from power?

The only way China’s actions make sense to me is if everyone is wrong about Xi’s grip on power and Xi Jinping is in serious trouble. There are two versions of this story.

The first scenario is that Xi Jinping expects he will lose. In this version, opponents have taken advantage of all those complaints about the economy and the general direction of China to secretly put together a coalition broad enough to unseat Xi. Western scholars and journalists, who have largely been kept out of China for the past two years, have not picked up the scent of this rebellion, but Xi has. Moreover, it is so large and powerful that he can’t just purge his opponents. He has to persuade them. In this scenario, he needs a major victory to re-establish his prestige. Even though there is a high risk of failure over Pelosi’s trip, he feels he has to take this chance in order to maintain his grip on power.

In the second scenario, Xi is still on track to win, but there is a significant challenge and his grip on power is looser than most people think. In this scenario, Xi understands that risks involved in escalating the conflict over the Pelosi visit. However, Xi is not fully in control. His opponents, sensing an opportunity, have used their influence over the media and other institutions to escalate the tension and forced Xi to go along with them. Essentially, they are pushing him into a situation in which there is a high possibility that he will come out looking weak. It is possible they might be able to push Xi out of power, and a significant defeat in Taiwan policy might be the thing that secures that outcome.

Again, most analysts reassure us that Xi is firmly on track to secure a third term, so neither of these scenarios should be in play. However, China’s actions and statements about the Pelosi visit make a lot more sense if Xi is in trouble.

Alternatively, perhaps no one in China is actually that worked up about Pelosi’s visit, and the USA is just taking China’s standard (insincere) doomsday rhetoric seriously yet again. I don’t think it is that simple, but it is logically consistent.

Postscript: While I was writing this, Nancy Pelosi’s office issued a press statement saying that she is leading a delegation to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. This doesn’t mean she is definitely not coming to Taiwan, but it seems more likely that she will not. China’s gamble might be paying off.