TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that China does not want to engage in a military conflict over Taiwan, despite being determined to annex the country in the future.
“It’s not our assessment that China wants to go to war,” the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Thursday (March 9), adding that “we continue to assess that even with respect to Taiwan, that they would prefer to achieve unification through peaceful means, other than through a use of force.” She said that despite this, China has stated that it is “utterly committed to unification.”
Haines said that if China believes peaceful unification is not an option, there is the potential for military conflict, adding that any conflict over Taiwan would have enormous economic impacts on the whole world. She said that the U.S. treasury, commerce groups, the intelligence community, and others have been working to estimate the impact an invasion would have on the availability of Taiwan’s semiconductors.
Director of the CIA William Burns echoed Haines, saying that his agency does not see any evidence that Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) has made a decision to invade Taiwan, and that China’s ambitions, while not to be underestimated, have likely been tempered by observing the outcomes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He said Xi has watched Vladimir Putin’s experience closely.
Burns said that Xi had been "sobered" by the extent that the West was able to put economic pressure on Russia and support the Ukrainian forces. He said that China’s first priority will be economic recovery and reengagement with the world as it comes out of zero COVID.
Haines delivered a speech to U.S. lawmakers summarizing the findings of the U.S. intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment report, which said that 2023 would likely see more Chinese crossings over the Taiwan Strait median line, and further Chinese missile launches over Taiwan, but that the intelligence community believes that China aims to preserve stability in East Asia. She said China aims to demonstrate a steady relationship with the U.S. to “avoid setbacks in its other relationships around the world, even while signaling its opposition to claimed U.S. provocations.”
