China’s obsession with Taiwan is not merely about sovereignty. It is about regime survival. The Chinese Communist Party views Taiwan’s independence, and even the confident assertion of Taiwanese autonomy, as a direct threat to its legitimacy at home and to its ambitions abroad.
Beijing insists that Taiwan has always been part of China, invoking the “One China” principle as historical truth. Yet this claim is far more contested than Beijing admits. Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. After the Second World War, Japan renounced all right, title and claim to Taiwan and the Pescadores under the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but the treaty did not explicitly transfer sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan’s post-war status therefore remains politically and legally disputed, whatever Beijing may claim.
This ambiguity matters because Taiwan’s democratic identity exposes the fragility of the CCP’s historical narrative. Beijing presents itself as the sole inheritor of Chinese sovereignty and civilization. Taiwan demonstrates something far more dangerous to that narrative: that a Chinese-speaking society can be democratic, pluralist, prosperous and sovereign in practice without the Communist Party.
Xi Jinping has tied his leadership to the promise of “national rejuvenation,” with reunification placed at the centre of that project. Failure to control Taiwan would puncture the nationalist mythology on which the CCP increasingly depends. This explains Beijing’s disproportionate response to symbolic gestures, from foreign parliamentary visits to meetings with Taiwan’s president. What appears to the outside world as protocol is treated by Beijing as a challenge to regime credibility.
The diplomatic battle is equally important. Taiwan has only a small number of formal diplomatic allies, but it maintains extensive unofficial, economic and representative relationships across the world. Beijing has worked relentlessly to reduce Taiwan’s diplomatic space, often using UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 as though it settled Taiwan’s sovereignty. It did not. The resolution recognized the People’s Republic of China as the lawful representative of China at the United Nations and expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. It did not mention Taiwan, nor did it determine that Taiwan belongs to the PRC.
Each act of international engagement with Taiwan, however limited, weakens Beijing’s diplomatic monopoly. It normalizes Taiwan’s de facto independence and reminds the world that the island is not merely an internal Chinese administrative question, but a self-governing democracy of more than 23 million people.
Taiwan is also central to the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. It anchors the first island chain, the strategic arc running from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines. If Taiwan remains outside Beijing’s control and deepens its security coordination with the United States, Japan and other regional partners, China’s naval expansion into the wider Pacific remains constrained. For Beijing, Taiwan is therefore not only a symbol. It is a strategic barrier.
Then there is the semiconductor question. Taiwan’s technological weight, led by TSMC, makes it indispensable to global supply chains. Its dominance in advanced chip manufacturing gives Taiwan an importance far beyond its size. An autonomous Taiwan controlling such critical technology diminishes China’s leverage and exposes Beijing’s own dependence on global supply chains it cannot fully command.
China’s paranoia is rooted in fear: fear of losing control over history, fear of domestic comparison, fear of diplomatic erosion and fear of strategic containment. Taiwan represents everything the CCP cannot tolerate. It is a living rebuttal to the idea that Chinese identity requires authoritarian rule. That is why Beijing cannot treat Taiwan simply as a territorial dispute. For the Communist Party, Taiwan is an existential ideological challenge.
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Khedroob Thondup
Khedroob Thondup is the son of Gyalo Thondup, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Educated at St. Stephens College Delhi University and the University of San Francisco. He was a personal assistant to the Dalai Lama and accompanied him on his first trip to the U.S. in 1979. He was sent by the Dalai Lama to Beijing from 1980 till 1993 for dialogue talks where he interacted with Xi Zhongxun and Hu Jintao. He has served as Member of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile for three terms and is the President of the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre Darjeeling since 1987. He has edited two books, Dalai Lama My Son and Tibet in Turmoil and presently lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
