Responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan on Tuesday, China announced live fire drills surrounding Taiwan, to be held from Thursday to Saturday. I suspect that the People's Liberation Army will launch weapons into Taiwanese territorial waters.
But that's just the start.
Pelosi's visit is undoubtedly courageous, coming against serious Chinese threats to intercept Pelosi's aircraft and "burn" her and the United States more generally. Reflecting these threats, Pelosi's Air Force transport aircraft was supported by a flight of Air Force F-15 fighter jets.
Still, Pelosi's trip carries very significant political and personal ramifications for Xi Jinping's leadership. The Chinese Communist leader is set to be crowned with a third term in office later this year and perhaps even receive a new official title. It was this it's-personal-for-Xi factor that motivated my belief that any visit should have been delayed to 2023.
Put simply, the arrival of America's second-most-important politician on what China regards as its sovereign territory is both a challenge to China's very conception of sovereignty and Xi's carefully sculpted leadership narrative. Xi wants to be seen as a leader destined to establish courageously Beijing's dominance as the 21st century's new superpower. Pelosi's visit will make Xi, an unusually paranoid leader leading an unusually paranoid regime, feel as if he has deliberately been made a fool of. At lower levels in the Communist Party apparatus, Pelosi's visit will hearken back to the age of Western imperialism in which Chinese citizens essentially lived as vassals. John Schindler offers a persuasive U.S. Civil War analogy for how this visit will play in Beijing.
Put another way, Xi cannot not respond robustly to Pelosi's visit. He and the all-powerful Central Committee will believe that a timid response to this trip would invite a foreign perception of Chinese Communist weakness and of Xi's leadership timidity. Alongside the live fire drills, it is therefore likely that China will conduct other operations, such as cyberattacks, flights into Taiwanese airspace, and, at least at some point, military deployments very close or perhaps even inside U.S. territorial airspace or waters.
The key point, however, is that this visit is likely to mark a decisive shift in Chinese strategic thinking over Taiwan. While increasing U.S. verbal and active support for Taiwan and Taiwan's own moves toward declared independence have alarmed Beijing, Xi has preferred to bide his time and strengthen his military before taking decisive action. That calculus of relative patience is now likely to change.