A disaster for China and dilemma for the West

Beijing's threats of war will again prove to be a failing electoral strategy for China. They have neither intimidated Taiwanese voters, nor persuaded them to their cause. Worse still, Beijing's insistence on framing the issue in such terms brings with it the danger of making conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy. Western governments, too, including Australia, are struggling with how to talk about Taiwan, but their problem in many ways is the opposite. Instead of talking up conflict, they are mostly trying to talk it down. In late 2021, and again in early 2022, the then defence minister Peter Dutton caused an…