Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
After annexation: How China plans to run Taiwan
Beijing’s thinking on Taiwan has shifted decisively from peaceful accommodation to absorptive control. As Taiwanese identity and democracy have become entrenched, Xi Jinping’s unification terms have hardened, demanding full political integration rather than offering genuine autonomy. Drawing on PRC academic and policy literature, this paper finds that Chinese scholars see a form of phased subjugation for the island: an immediate security crackdown neutralising political opponents; institutional restructuring beyond what has taken place in Hong Kong; and a decades-long psychological re-engineering project so Taiwanese come to identify with the CCP’s China. Millions of Taiwanese would be excluded from public life and many current political leaders would be jailed.
Yet PRC thinking on integration is riddled with unresolved contradictions. Autonomy without credible guarantees generates no trust; coercion achieves stability but not legitimacy; economic integration cannot substitute for consent. Beijing understands the scale of the challenge it would face — governing a consolidated democracy against its will — but remains ideologically constrained from resolving it.
In August 2024, scholars at a Xiamen-based think tank published a paper urging Beijing to immediately establish a shadow Taiwan government on the Chinese mainland in preparation for a full takeover of the island. “It is imperative to prepare a plan for the comprehensive takeover of Taiwan after unification,” the authors wrote. The scholars were writing at a fraught moment for Beijing. Only months earlier, the anti-China Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had taken office after a third consecutive presidential election win. Unusually for a Chinese publication on such a politically sensitive topic, the paper made several frank admissions: that opposition to unification within Taiwan had deepened rather than softened; that Hong Kong’s post-1997 governance model was ill-suited to Taiwan; and that many Chinese officials lacked even a basic understanding of political and social conditions on the island. The paper circulated briefly before disappearing from China’s internet, which underscored the sensitivity of the topic and the rarity of such candour.
Outside of China, analysis of Taiwan remains overwhelmingly focused on the mechanics of a potential maritime blockade or military takeover, for understandable reasons. Such a focus is warranted, as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would rank among the most economically and militarily disruptive events of the twenty-first century. Yet this emphasis on how Beijing might use force to seize Taiwan has come at the expense of an equally significant question of how it would attempt to rule the island afterwards. The Xiamen paper was notable not because it represented official policy, but because it acknowledged the broader, largely opaque debate underway on this topic inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
As with early discussions of the war in Ukraine, a narrow focus on battlefield outcomes, while necessary for understanding military and broader strategic dynamics, obscures the potentially more difficult and ultimately more decisive problem of a post-conflict occupation. Military victory, even if achieved at extraordinary cost, would not resolve the Taiwan problem as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defines it. It would instead set off a prolonged and uncertain phase marked by acute governance and administrative challenges, potential legitimacy deficits, and sustained struggles between a victorious external power and a resistant society. History suggests that occupying, administering, and politically transforming a complex democratic society is often more difficult than defeating it militarily. In other words, the success or failure of unification could be determined by the political order that follows any transfer of control, as much as it would be by events in Taiwan’s airspace or surrounding waters.
Taiwan would present challenges categorically different from those Beijing has faced in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or other peripheral regions. Taiwan is a high-income liberal democracy with a strong political identity, dense civic institutions, an independent legal culture, a boisterous free media, and deep integration into global economic, high-tech, and informational networks. Governing such a society by force would impose large and enduring political, economic, and security costs on the Chinese state, and in turn would shape Beijing’s own domestic politics, its international standing, and global economic stability for decades. China’s challenge is nothing less than the full transformation of the structure and identity of a society and a people that see the CCP largely as an antagonistic entity.
According to a recent Mainland Affairs Council opinion poll, a definitive Taiwanese tracking survey, about seven per cent of adults — equivalent to approximately 1.3 million people — support an immediate declaration of independence. Under Beijing’s rule, anyone who maintained this position would risk jail. Many hundreds of thousands could be deprived of voting rights. All would likely be excluded from the civil service, at all levels of government.
Using the metric of party identification, the number of people whose political freedoms would be directly threatened is even higher. About a third of Taiwanese voters identify as supporters of the DPP, which the CCP considers to be an incubator, if not a promoter, of anti-Beijing sentiment. That equates to about 6.5 million people. The bureaucracy, along with lawyers, journalists, civil society activists, and even business leaders would have to display loyalty to the CCP at the risk of losing their jobs or being sent to prison.
Lest anyone doubt that Beijing has an appetite for such monumental repression, there is an example close at hand. From 2017, acting on orders from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the authorities in Xinjiang put as many as one million Uyghur, Kazakh, and members of other Central Asian ethnic groups into prisons and internment camps, where they “underwent indoctrination aimed at turning them into secular, patriotic supporters of the party”. The region was placed under blanket surveillance, and children removed from their families were sent to special boarding schools. Taiwan’s political cleansing likely would be of a much greater magnitude, given the entrenchment of attitudes, values, and norms that Beijing would almost certainly consider an existential risk to its takeover plans.
Inside China, some analysts are grappling with this reality. Over the past decade, and especially since Xi Jinping’s 2019 “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan”, PRC scholars, legal experts, and policy researchers have shifted their focus to the problem of post-unification rule. With greater urgency and specificity, Taiwan is framed as an acute governance challenge involving regime security, institutional control, identity transformation, and the management of long-term resistance under conditions of intense international scrutiny. While the use or threat of force remains central to Beijing’s Taiwan strategy, Chinese authors emphasise institutional sequencing, legal architecture, and sustained political integration. At the same time, these writings reveal persistent anxieties about legitimacy and capacity, and the long-term sustainability of rule over a society that has developed outside the PRC’s political orbit for more than seven decades.
Recent experience in Hong Kong has strongly shaped this shift in tone. For many Chinese scholars, Hong Kong demonstrated both the risks of excessive tolerance and the limits of late-stage corrective intervention. The 2019–2020 protests, followed by the imposition of the National Security Law and the restructuring of Hong Kong’s political system, reinforced a core lesson that autonomy not tightly bounded and continuously supervised can evolve into a direct threat to regime security. What is more, case studies of the Hong Kong experience emphasise the importance of the political, social, and information preparatory groundwork that must precede de jure envelopment.
Chinese analysts also draw on experiences in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as broader debates about ruling what PRC scholars describe as a “super-large state”. The central challenge is not whether diversity can be incorporated and reprogrammed, but how it can be managed without undermining centralised political authority. Taiwan is increasingly seen within this framework as a high-risk, high-importance zone requiring intrusive controls and long time horizons to achieve full political, institutional, and ideological integration.
Officially, Beijing is relatively muted on how, precisely, it would govern Taiwan if it could achieve its long-held goal of annexing the island. Under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework, first formulated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, Taiwan would become a Special Administrative Region, and would be permitted, in theory, to retain “its current social system and enjoy a high degree of autonomy in accordance with the law”. Beyond this sketchy outline, however, Beijing is silent.
Rather than speculating about Beijing’s intentions and post-unification plans in the abstract, this paper draws on PRC academic, legal, and policy-adjacent literature published between 2019 and 2025, supplemented by comparative historical cases. These materials do not constitute official policy, but they offer critical insight into how Chinese elites see the challenges of unification, the tools they believe are available and necessary, and the contradictions embedded in their own logic.
Finally, a note on methodology is warranted. The body of literature this paper draws upon is substantial and, in many respects, candid about the challenges Beijing would face governing a post-unification Taiwan. But it has inherent limits. Classified planning documents, internal party assessments, and the working assumptions of military and security planners are by definition absent from the open record. There is also a more subtle gap: PRC scholars writing on sensitive Taiwan governance questions operate within political constraints that shape what can be argued, what must be hedged, and what cannot be said at all. The literature reviewed here likely represents a floor, not a ceiling, of how Beijing’s planners think about post-annexation governance challenges. Where PRC authors acknowledge difficulties or tensions, this should be read as a signal that the underlying concerns are real, not as evidence that the problems are being fully confronted in print.
This paper also makes no claim to comprehensiveness. What follows is an attempt to identify notable, illuminating, and analytically interesting features of this conversation, rather than a systematic survey of the field. This paper is, then, a starting point rather than a definitive account.
The Chinese Communist Party has extensive experience governing societies in which it arrived as an alien ruling power. From the 1950s onwards, the PRC imposed distinct models on Xinjiang and Tibet, which are both nominally “autonomous” regions, steadily erasing whatever administrative or cultural differences once existed. More recently, Beijing has accelerated Hong Kong’s integration into the mainland’s system. Through lawfare, intimidation, the jailing of political opponents, and institutional penetration and co-optation, the PRC has dismantled democratic politics, constrained independent courts, hollowed out civil society, and brought religious institutions under tighter Party control. The promise of “One Country, Two Systems”, once presented as a durable model for the first 50 years of Hong Kong’s post-1997 handover, now functions primarily as a transitional slogan.
Taiwan would present a challenge of a far greater order than these other examples. The island has been independently governed since the 1940s and a thriving democracy since the mid-1990s, but its resistance to outside rule predates modern politics. Spanish and Dutch colonial projects failed, and the Qing dynasty faced recurrent uprisings. Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) brought modernisation but also persistent resistance, often suppressed violently. The Kuomintang’s post-1945 takeover followed the same pattern: authoritarian consolidation, bloody crackdowns, and the suppression of rivals.
Since political liberalisation began in the mid-1980s under Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan has developed into a functioning liberal democracy. Power changes hands through elections; legislatures and local governments matter; protest is normalised; courts are more independent; civil society is entrenched; private firms operate under law rather than bureaucratic fiat; and the military has been depoliticised into a national institution rather than a party army.
These political changes have been accompanied by a deepening sense of Taiwanese identity. Despite Beijing’s claims of timeless “Chineseness”, identification with Taiwan has strengthened over recent decades and is now embedded in democratic institutions and party competition. A poll conducted by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University reports that a mere 2.5 per cent of the population identifies as Chinese. Taiwan is a polyglot society with multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. Even Mandarin’s dominance as the national language dates only to a post-war political decree. Identity divergence is not incidental — it is structural. In short, modern Taiwan’s defining features are fundamentally incompatible with the CCP’s illiberal, Leninist governing model. Communist doctrine does not, and could not, tolerate political pluralism and rival centres of authority.
A military victory in the Taiwan Strait could conceivably shatter resistance and allow Beijing to impose control. But it is at least as likely that China would confront a prolonged struggle to govern a society that views it as an occupying power. According to polling data, many Taiwanese would see Beijing’s presence not as unification but as conquest and would resist accordingly. How Beijing plans to manage that reality, and whether it can do so at acceptable cost, is the central problem this paper examines.
Over the past decade, Beijing’s framing of the Taiwan question has undergone a quiet but fundamental transformation. While the core objective of ending Taiwan’s separate political status and bringing the island under PRC sovereignty has remained consistent, the vocabulary used to justify and operationalise that objective has shifted markedly. What was once presented primarily as a project of “peaceful unification” under a flexible institutional arrangement has increasingly been reframed as a task of “complete national unity”.
This shift reflects a reassessment within the Chinese party-state about the nature of the Taiwan problem, the sources of resistance to unification, and the limits of autonomy-based solutions. In PRC academic and policy-adjacent literature, Taiwan is now treated less as a territory awaiting institutional accommodation and more as a politically complex, ideologically contested society whose incorporation would pose acute risks to regime security. As a result, governance, rather than negotiation, has moved to the centre of Beijing’s strategic thinking.
For much of the post-Cold War period, Beijing’s preferred framing of the Taiwan question rested on the twin formula of “peaceful unification” and “One Country, Two Systems”. This formulation served multiple purposes. Externally, it signalled restraint and a willingness to resolve sovereignty disputes without resorting to force. Internally, it provided a bridge between the PRC’s insistence on territorial integrity and the reality of Taiwan’s separate political system.
In the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s ascension to power, the then Chinese leader offered Taiwan a deal: it could keep its governing, economic, and social systems and even its military, as long as Taipei acknowledged it was part of the PRC. Taiwan rejected the proposal at the time and continues to do so today. The context of that rejection, though, has changed radically. In 1979, Chiang Ching-kuo ruled Taiwan as the Republic of China. Formally, constitutionally, and emotionally, Chiang asserted that he led the true government of all of China. Taiwan’s view of itself in the world has been upended since then. Its resistance to Beijing’s entreaties has become much more entrenched, founded in a hardened sense of Taiwanese identity and anti-authoritarian democratic politics. Although the Constitution of the Republic of China has never been formally amended to renounce its historical claim over all of China, Taipei has operated in law and practice as a state governing only the territory it controls since the early 1990s.
Jiang Zemin, then CCP general secretary, released a similar plan in January 1995, and restated it after the Hong Kong handover. Qian Qichen, a former foreign minister and then vice-premier, reiterated Jiang’s eight-point plan in detail in a speech in 2001. The speech makes for remarkable reading now.
“Taiwan”, says Qian, “can continue to use the Taiwan dollar, to retain its military, to be a separate customs territory and maintain its governmental structure. The mainland will not collect a single cent of Taiwan’s tax revenue, and it will not transfer a single cent of Taiwan’s funds. The way of life of Taiwan’s people will remain unchanged. Taiwan’s entrepreneurs will retain their original property. Taiwan’s personnel will be autonomous, and the mainland will not send any officials to Taiwan to serve in the country.”
In recent years, however, this relatively more tolerant language has been progressively discarded and replaced with an emphasis on “the complete unification of the motherland” (祖国完全统一). This phrase features prominently in Party documents, leadership speeches, and scholarly writing. While it does not replace or contradict the “One Country, Two Systems” mantra, it decisively alters the hierarchy of priorities and significantly limits the scope of autonomy that could be extended to Taipei. The emphasis on "complete" unification signals that acceptable outcomes must fully eliminate Taiwan's separate political identity rather than merely managing it.
The persistence of a self-governing democratic polity on what Beijing defines as Chinese territory is treated as a fundamental violation of sovereign completeness rather than an anomaly to be managed. Zhou Zhihuai, of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification, puts the matter bluntly: “National unification is not like ‘buying vegetables at the market’. It cannot be bargained over.”
This logic leads naturally to a third reframing around the elimination of identity divergence. Earlier, PRC policy often assumed that identity differences between Taiwan and the PRC were either superficial or malleable, and that economic integration and people-to-people exchanges would gradually soften resistance. Contemporary scholarship is more pessimistic. Many Chinese analysts now accept that decades of separation have produced a distinct identity in Taiwan that is explicitly tied to democratic self-rule and opposition to authoritarian governance. As one scholar from Renmin University put it in a 2024 seminar on the topic, “by accelerating ‘de-Sinicisation’ (去中国化) through history, culture, and education, the DPP authorities have produced confusion and distortion in Taiwan’s historical outlook, narrowing the space for peaceful cross-Strait development and peaceful unification.” Identity divergence is thus no longer a secondary problem to be addressed after unification, but a central obstacle that must be confronted directly through force, re-education, and long-term social transformation. In the aggregate, these shifts mark a move away from an accommodationist logic towards a more directly absorptive one.
This evolution is closely tied to a reclassification of Taiwan within PRC strategic thinking as a “high-risk governance zone”, or a territory whose political and social characteristics pose exceptional challenges to post-unification control.
First, political pluralism in the form of competitive elections, robust competition among distinct political parties, and an active civil society are seen as sources of instability and resistance. Second, Taiwan is characterised as ideologically hostile. This hostility is not defined solely in terms of separatist sentiment, but more broadly as the entrenchment of values — such as popular sovereignty, individual rights, and limits on state power — that are antithetical to CCP rule. And third, Taiwan is portrayed as deeply penetrated by foreign influence. Many PRC scholars emphasise Taiwan’s security ties with the United States, its participation in global information networks, and its openness to external political and cultural currents.
This depiction of Taiwan is sharpened through contrasting it with Hong Kong. While Hong Kong possessed strong legal and economic institutions, its political identity was shallow, fragmented, “Westernised”, and susceptible to reorientation under central authority after 150 years of colonial rule. PRC scholars emphasise that Hong Kong residents “never possessed ‘state consciousness’” because Hong Kong was “a colonial regime governed by outsiders”. Taiwan, by contrast, is increasingly described as possessing a consolidated counter-regime political identity that is defined not just by difference from the mainland but by affirmative attachment to democracy and political autonomy. PRC analyses note that Taiwan, “due to historical reasons, possesses a ‘Republic of China constitutional system’ composed of its own ‘constitution’, administrative, legislative, [and] judicial organs, military, and political parties”.
The logical conclusion drawn by Chinese scholars is that greater pre-emptive control would be justified in Taiwan. This does not necessarily mean the immediate abolition of all local institutions, but it does imply tighter supervision, more restrictive definitions of autonomy, and earlier deployment of national security mechanisms than in Hong Kong. As a result, the balance has tilted towards control, even at the cost of international backlash or short-term instability.
In Chinese scholarly writing, the models for taking Taiwan come in a cacophony of forms. There is “peaceful reunification” (和统), “military reunification” (武统), “forced reunification” (逼统), “governance-led reunification” (治统), “negotiated reunification” (协统), “smart or strategic reunification” (智统), “integration-led reunification” (融统), “combined reunification” (合统), and so on. The five forms most discussed are the peaceful, military, forced, governance-led, and smart reunification models.
Chinese scholars draw on historical analogies that combine military pressure, elite fragmentation, and post-conflict political consolidation. These models are not blueprints, but they reveal how Chinese analysts think about coercion, capitulation, and governance after victory.
One cluster of models emphasises siege, blockade, and elite fracture. The so-called “Changchun Model”, drawn from the CCP’s 1948 siege of the Nationalist-held city, is invoked to illustrate how sustained isolation can divide elites, trigger defections, and force surrender without a decisive frontal assault. The siege's strategic principle was articulated as “attacking the heart is superior to attacking the city”. In this scenario, political work targeted senior Nationalist officers, resulting in “military morale wavering” and “desertion and defection phenomena increasing daily” within the defending garrison. Applied to Taiwan, it advocates a blockade that could exhaust resources, intensify internal political divisions, and compel negotiations once resistance becomes untenable.
The “Tibet Model” similarly emphasises the use of limited military force to impose a fait accompli, followed by negotiations conducted under overwhelming coercive pressure. As one analysis explicitly framed it, the Tibet Model aims at “using force to compel negotiations, using negotiations to promote unification”, conducting “frontal combat” to establish control over key territory, and using psychological “high-pressure methods to force the local regime into peaceful unification negotiations”.
A second cluster of historical analogies emphasises overwhelming military dominance short of a protracted siege. The so-called “Beijing Model”, drawn from the CCP’s 1949 entry into Beiping (as Beijing was mostly known between 1928 and 1949), is often invoked to illustrate how superior force and political isolation can induce defenders to negotiate a surrender. In official writings, the episode is remembered as a template for using intense but controlled military pressure to produce a surrender without the need for systematic devastation. The lesson extracted in contemporary commentary is that once resistance appears futile and the correlation of forces unmistakable, political collapse can occur rapidly. As Wang Zaixi, a former deputy director of the Taiwan Affairs Office, framed it, this approach entails “subduing the enemy without battle … a perfect combination of peaceful unification and forceful unification”.
A related analogy, sometimes described as the “Vietnam Model”, shifts attention outward. Here, the emphasis is not on internal fracture but on international adaptation. Once a battlefield outcome becomes irreversible, external powers gradually reconcile themselves to the new reality, even if they had previously backed the losing side. Together, these precedents reinforce a theory of victory through demonstrated inevitability.
The most extensively discussed and politically salient analogy, however, is Crimea. Here, Russia’s 2014 annexation is an example of a successful territorial seizure by a Beijing-friendly power that offers lessons not only for conquest but for post-conflict management. Crimea is cited for how Moscow blurred the line between civilians and combatants, leveraged sympathetic local populations, and moved rapidly from occupation to political consolidation. Wang Wen of Renmin University, a prominent nationalist intellectual, praised Russia’s promotion of “shared history” through museums and memorials that foster identification with the Russian state, arguing that such measures helped recast annexation as reunification.
Crimea also looms large in discussions of the use of referenda as legitimation theatre. After consolidating control, Russia staged a tightly managed vote to formalise annexation. Some Chinese analysts are explicit that any referendum involving Taiwan would be circumscribed, with the electorate and outcome effectively predetermined. In a 2013 paper, Hu Shihong of the Xi’an Institute of the Politics of the PLA said: “If any region or ethnic group within China’s territory seeks ‘independence’ or creates facts leading to separation from China through means like ‘national self-determination’ or ‘referendums’, the central government has the right to use force to counteract the separation and maintain territorial integrity.” In this framing, referenda are not instruments for gauging popular will, but mechanisms for ratifying outcomes already imposed.
While military force may determine the immediate outcome of a cross-Strait conflict, the Chinese recognise that the law will play a decisive role in consolidating and legitimising control over time. In PRC discussions, law is not conceived primarily as a constraint on power, but as an instrument to reconstitute political order, redefine rights and obligations, and normalise exceptional measures taken in the name of sovereignty and security. As one scholar frames it: “Legal integration after reunification is not only a technical issue but also a political issue, relating to the consolidation of national unity and long-term stability.”
The 2022 Taiwan White Paper declares flatly that “resolution of the Taiwan question is entirely China’s internal affair, governed by domestic law rather than international law”. PRC scholars reinforce this position, asserting “any attempt to internationalise or legalise the Taiwan question is an infringement on Chinese sovereignty”. Chinese debates oscillate between adaptations of the Hong Kong model and proposals for a bespoke legal arrangement tailored to Taiwan's scale and complexity. What unites these approaches is a shared assumption that any post-unification legal order must preserve the central government’s ultimate authority to intervene, reinterpret, and override local institutions in the name of security and stability.
At the apex of this hierarchy stands the PRC Constitution, which enshrines principles of territorial integrity, national unity, and the indivisibility of state sovereignty. PRC scholars routinely interpret these provisions as providing the ultimate legal basis for unification and for any measures deemed necessary to achieve or safeguard it. The Constitution is treated as the source of authority not only for reclaiming sovereignty, but for restructuring political institutions after unification.
The Anti-Secession Law (ASL), adopted in 2005, also occupies a pivotal position in PRC legal debates on Taiwan. While often discussed in Western analysis primarily as an authorisation for the use of force, PRC scholars emphasise that the ASL also provides a legal foundation for post-force rule. One scholar argues that the law “not only provides a legal basis for safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity and opposing and containing ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities, but also reserves space for legal governance after reunification”. Another analysis emphasises that Article 8 demonstrates that “the law is concerned not only with the means of reunification, but also with how to maintain national unity and territorial integrity after reunification”. In other words, the ASL’s logic does not expire. Instead, it transitions from authorising force to legitimising measures aimed at preventing renewed separatism.
The National Security Law and related national security legislation further reinforce this framework. Since 2015, the PRC has constructed an expansive legal architecture defining national security in broad regime-centric terms. National security is understood to encompass not only military threats, but political stability, ideological security, social order, and resistance to foreign interference. In PRC scholarship, as a result, national security law is widely viewed as directly applicable to Taiwan after unification, providing legal grounds for surveillance, restrictions on political activity, and the restructuring of media, education, and civil society.
In total, these instruments establish a clear legal logic. Taiwan is an internal matter governed by domestic law; sovereignty is treated as absolute and indivisible; and national security provides a flexible justification for intervention across all of government, commerce, and society. External guarantees, including international treaties, foreign security assurances, and multilateral oversight, are illegitimate. Within this framework, debates about post-unification governance focus less on whether Beijing has the legal right to act, and more on how that authority should be exercised.
Two broad models dominate PRC discussions. The first envisions the passage of a “Taiwan Basic Law”, modelled formally on the Basic Laws of Hong Kong and Macau. Proponents argue that such a law would provide a clear legal framework for a pseudo-autonomy, reassure local elites, and signal continuity with existing PRC practice. At the same time, many acknowledge that Taiwan’s size, political history, and level of institutional development would require significant departures from the Hong Kong model.
The second model emphasises a political agreement followed by direct incorporation into the PRC’s constitutional and legal order. In this approach, the agreement itself is treated as a transitional instrument rather than a permanent settlement. Once sovereignty is reasserted, the central authorities would retain the power to revise, reinterpret, or supersede the agreement through domestic legislation. Advocates of this model argue that it offers greater flexibility and avoids the symbolic and legal constraints associated with a Basic Law framework.
Despite their differences, neither model envisions any legal constraints on central authority.
In contrast to liberal constitutional traditions that treat autonomy as deriving from popular sovereignty or entrenched constitutional rights, PRC scholarship defines autonomy as a contingent power granted by the central state. A high degree of autonomy is understood not as a fixed entitlement, but as a conditional arrangement subject to permanent political evaluation. There is no recognition of residual authority or inherent self-governing rights.
Three principles recur in Chinese debates. First, all autonomous powers are derived from the central government and exist only within the scope defined by national law. Second, specific areas of competence, including economic policy, local administration, and cultural affairs, may be delegated, but core domains including defence, foreign affairs, national security, and constitutional interpretation remain firmly under central control. Third, autonomy is conditional, depending on adherence to central priorities including opposition to separatism, acceptance of CCP leadership, and maintenance of social stability.
The Hong Kong experience looms large. PRC scholars recurrently cite the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress as the ultimate arbiter of constitutional meaning and a necessary safeguard against local deviation and legal obstruction.
National security reinforces this logic. The imposition of the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020 is widely cited in PRC literature as a measure to correct excessive tolerance of the political pluralism that allowed separatist forces to exploit legal and institutional gaps. The lesson is that autonomy without robust security oversight is unstable and ultimately self-defeating.
Applied to Taiwan, these precedents have clear implications. Taiwan’s legislative, judicial, and administrative institutions would not be able to block or nullify interventions by the central authorities. Even in proposals advocating generous initial autonomy, the PRC insists on mechanisms for adjustment in response to changing political conditions. Rigid guarantees of political, legal, and judicial autonomy would, in the eyes of many PRC analysts, incentivise resistance, encourage international involvement, and constrain the state’s ability to respond to unforeseen challenges. The flexibility to revise rules unilaterally is treated as a virtue rather than a deficiency. As Zhu Lei, a scholar at Minnan Normal University, has stated, “After unification, Taiwan will practice a high degree of autonomy, but political power is granted by and subject to the direct leadership of the central authorities.”
Some recent PRC scholarship treats formal unification not as the endpoint but rather as the beginning of a transitional governance period. While no formal blueprint is presented, a consistent sequencing logic emerges: consolidate political order, restructure institutions, and pursue long-term integration. This sequencing reflects recognition that Taiwan’s political pluralism and international exposure make immediate institutional assimilation difficult, even unrealistic. Some PRC experts warn that autonomy or political openness introduced before control is consolidated could create space for renewed mobilisation by “separatist forces”. The priority, therefore, is to secure the political environment before normalising governance. In addition, governance after unification should be seen as a prolonged and managed process rather than a decisive institutional reset.
To many PRC experts, a core challenge is Taiwan’s democratic political identity and its shaping over decades outside the PRC’s ideological system. As a result, resistance is expected to persist even after formal sovereignty transfer, particularly among younger generations, civil society networks, and professionals. Taiwan’s thicket of institutions — including media outlets, social organisations, professional associations, and local governments — is seen as providing fertile ground for covert or indirect forms of opposition. Taiwan’s international connectivity is also expected to sustain external attention and support for dissent.
Against this backdrop, Chinese scholars increasingly reject the idea that separatism can be addressed through temporary campaigns or ad hoc crackdowns. Instead, they argue for embedding counter-separatism into the routine operation of government. Anti-separatism is not seen as an emergency response, but a permanent dimension of political order — analogous to counter-terrorism or counter-extremism in other contexts. This logic draws heavily on experiences in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Scholars Xue Yonghui and Yao Zehao argue that unification would not conclude the Taiwan question but inaugurate a new phase of oversight centred on building a durable, institutionalised, anti-secession framework. Their analysis builds on a model developed by Xiong Hongliang and Duan Lei distinguishing “unstable unity” from “ideal unity”, which holds that the central post-unification challenge is preventing a relapse into conditions that allow separatist forces to regroup. Drawing on comparative cases, including US constitutional prohibitions on rebellion, Spain's response to Catalonia, Tanzania’s union structure, and Hong Kong's post-2020 national security regime, they argue that successful states entrench territorial integrity at the constitutional level, criminalise secessionist acts, and create institutional safeguards to prevent political capture by separatist forces. For Taiwan, this implies strengthening constitutional language on national unity and establishing clear criminal penalties for renewed separatist mobilisation. As Xue and Yao conclude, “If the question of Taiwan compatriots' national identity cannot be resolved, then such unification is in reality a superficial, formal ‘unstable unity’, and the latent separatist factors are very likely to re-emerge under certain conditions.”
The authors also propose an oath and eligibility system for public office to ensure adherence to national unity and constitutional order, echoing Hong Kong’s post-2020 “patriots governing” framework. A degree of autonomy, in their conception, remains possible, but only within a centralised sovereignty structure defined by “comprehensive central oversight”. Taiwan could retain broad administrative, fiscal, and judicial authority, yet such autonomy would be conditional, revocable, and restricted by national security imperatives.
References to “denazification” appear only sporadically by name in PRC writing, but the underlying logic of a systematic political exclusion through law is central to governance of a post-unification Taiwan.
In 2018, Zhou Yezhong of Wuhan University’s law school explicitly invoked post-war Germany as an analogy, arguing that Taiwan would require legal mechanisms to “eliminate the poisonous residue of pro-independence sentiments” after unification. He proposed using the Anti-Secession Law (2005) to treat participation in pro-independence activity as a terminating condition for public office. As a partial concession, Zhou suggested conditional amnesties for officials who had previously supported independence but subsequently demonstrated loyalty by actively countering anti-Beijing movements. That such proposals come from one of China’s most prestigious law schools underscores that this argument is not fringe.
More commonly, the same objective is framed in the language of patriotism, a concept equated directly with political loyalty, as in Hong Kong. Chinese scholars argue that Taiwan would require similar loyalty tests from the outset. Thus, public officials would be required to pledge loyalty; foreign citizenship or residency would trigger disqualification; media would be placed under political discipline; and electoral systems would be redesigned so that only “patriotic” candidates could stand. As in Hong Kong, exclusion would be justified not as repression but as a prerequisite for effective government and national security.
PRC writings often argue that security cannot be delegated entirely to local authorities in politically sensitive regions. In some cases, central agencies must maintain a permanent presence. Their mandates would likely encompass intelligence collection, oversight of local law enforcement, coordination with military and paramilitary forces, and supervision of politically sensitive cases. While local authorities may retain administrative responsibilities, ultimate authority over national security matters would be reserved for the centre.
Some PRC scholars emphasise the importance of jurisdictional ambiguity. By maintaining overlapping authorities and broad definitions of security threats, central institutions retain flexibility to intervene when needed. This ambiguity is viewed as a deterrent in itself, discouraging political activism by increasing uncertainty about enforcement thresholds. Other scholars, such as Tian Feilong, argue for the need to quickly introduce a Hong Kong-like national security law to pre-empt “local factions and external intervention forces” that will “inevitably engage in provocation and sabotage”.
Surveillance and monitoring constitute the operational backbone of anti-separatism management. As in the PRC itself, Chinese scholars increasingly emphasise that modern governance relies less on reactive punishment and more on anticipatory control, with an objective of identifying potential threats early, disrupting networks before they coalesce, and shaping behaviour through continuous oversight.
Taiwan’s advanced digital infrastructure features prominently in this framing. PRC analysts have characterised Taiwan’s open digital platforms as tools for separatist mobilisation, foreign interference, and the construction of an autonomous “network sovereignty” incompatible with national reunification. By extension, Taiwan’s digital environment would be forced to integrate into mainland regulatory frameworks quickly after unification. Online platforms, messaging applications, and social media would be subject to content moderation, algorithmic filtering, and real-name registration requirements consistent with existing mainland internet practice. Unlike earlier eras, when censorship was overt and episodic, the mainland model would become embedded in everyday life.
Internal contradictions are evident in this approach, with the most fundamental tension between permanence and legitimacy. A standing counter-resistance regime presumes that political opposition will remain endemic, yet the existence of such a regime may itself perpetuate opposition.
Some PRC scholars acknowledge, often obliquely, the risk of governance fatigue. Sustained surveillance and political vetting require significant administrative capacity and fiscal resources. Over time, these demands may strain local resources, crowd out social and economic policy priorities, and erode bureaucratic effectiveness. In a society as economically complex and globally integrated as Taiwan, these costs may be particularly pronounced.
Permanent anti-separatism governance also risks generating ongoing diplomatic friction, economic retaliation, and reputational damage, as happened with Hong Kong and Xinjiang. There is also an unresolved tension between anti-separatism governance and long-term integration goals. Younger generations may interpret permanent security oversight as confirmation of political exclusion rather than inclusion, reinforcing the very identity divergence the state seeks to eliminate. A governance model predicated on permanent suspicion risks entrenching resistance rather than dissolving it. Anticipating this, scholars such as Renmin University’s Wang Yingjin argue:
“After unification across the strait, we must avoid repeating the 'well water doesn't disturb river water' phenomenon that emerged in Hong Kong's practice. When we design the 'One Country, Two Systems' Taiwan framework, we should lay down an institutional platform for cross-strait co-governance and encourage and support Taiwan's people — especially young people — to participate in national construction, linking their personal destinies to the nation's future.”
Among PRC scholars and policy analysts, identity is increasingly treated as the central variable in the Taiwan problem, and the most difficult to change after unification. Military force, legal authority, and institutional restructuring may establish control, but they do not resolve what Chinese authors describe as the deeper challenge of managing a population whose political identity has evolved in opposition to the PRC’s governing model. As a result, post-unification rule is not seen merely as an administrative or security task, but as a long-term project of identity engineering and psychological integration.
Earlier PRC approaches to Taiwan often assumed that identity divergence was either overstated or malleable through economic integration and cross-Strait exchange. Contemporary writings are far more cautious. As one mainland scholar concluded: “In the anti-separatist struggle, national identity is an important factor, which is mainly manifested in political identity and cultural identity. The opposition of political consciousness and the lack of cultural identity together led to the national identity crisis among some Hong Kong people and Taiwan people.” Some Chinese analysts now acknowledge that Taiwan’s democratic experience has produced a resilient political culture, reinforced by institutional practice rather than elite rhetoric alone. Elections, independent media, civic activism, and legal autonomy all reinforce a sense of popular sovereignty that directly contradicts the PRC’s political order. From this perspective, removing or discrediting individual leaders will be insufficient. The challenge lies in reshaping the social and psychological environment that sustains political opposition.
Younger people in Taiwan are frequently described as having little lived connection to the mainland and limited emotional attachment to the Chinese nation as defined by the PRC. This generational shift is especially concerning for the PRC because it suggests that identity divergence is deepening over time. As a result, post-unification governance would likely focus heavily on youth, education, and long-term cultural reproduction. Chinese scholars acknowledge that identity cannot be transformed through coercion alone, though coercion sits at the core of the unification project.
Schools and universities are described as the principal institutions through which historical narratives, political values, and national identity are transmitted across generations. Post-unification rule is expected to prioritise educational reform early and maintain it consistently over time.
Senior Chinese diplomats — the ambassadors to France and Australia, for example — have been frank about the need for “re-education”. Xiao Qian, the Ambassador to Australia, said: “There might be [a] process for the people in Taiwan to have a correct understanding of China.” China’s Ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, was more explicit, accusing the DPP of turning Taiwanese against reunification. “We will re-educate. I’m sure that the Taiwanese population will again become favourable [to] the reunification and will become patriots again,” Lu told French TV.
On the concept of “re-education”, PRC writings emphasise several objectives. First, they call for the revision of historical narratives. Taiwan’s education system is often criticised for presenting history in ways that accentuate local distinctiveness, including the Japanese colonial experience and democratic transition, while downplaying connections to the Chinese nation. Post-unification reforms are expected to re-anchor historical instruction within a framework of shared heritage, common destiny, and the legitimacy of PRC sovereignty. As one scholar noted, “It is necessary to strengthen the historical narrative of the Chinese nation within educational content, thereby correcting the ‘Taiwan-centric historical perspective’ prevalent in Taiwan's education sector”.
Second, they focus on the reorientation of civic education. Concepts such as popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and constitutional constraint, which are central to Taiwan’s democratic experience, are viewed with hostility in the PRC and will be replaced by a focus on national unity, collective interest, and the primacy of state authority.
Third, the objective of personnel control is underscored. In the words of one PRC expert, “Clear red lines must be drawn to ensure that only patriotic and Taiwan-loving individuals hold positions within educational departments, thoroughly eliminating ‘Taiwan independence’ elements from the education system.” Vetting, retraining, and replacement of educators are therefore presented as essential to identity engineering. In higher education, where academic freedom and international exchange are the norm, additional oversight will curtail and criminalise the dissemination of ideas deemed politically harmful.
Here, Hong Kong again looms large, with several scholars arguing that there was a distinct failure by Beijing and the local authorities to shape educational curricula in ways that strengthened a pro-Mainland political, social, and cultural identity. As Southeast University’s Xu Chuan argues, “national education was not promoted in a timely and effective manner after the return [of Hong Kong to PRC control in 1997], nor were political rituals in the cultural-educational sphere reformed, causing the optimal period for reshaping youth identity to be missed.”
Beyond education, Taiwan’s freewheeling media environment is portrayed as both a source of resistance and an opportunity for intervention.
On the restrictive side, PRC writings emphasise the need to prevent the dissemination of narratives that challenge sovereignty, glorify resistance, or promote alternative political identities. Chinese analysts also stress the need to generate compelling narratives that promote national identity and political legitimacy. This includes state-supported cultural production, entertainment, and public messaging designed to normalise PRC authority and reframe unification as historically inevitable and morally justified.
Cultural policy extends beyond media to encompass language use, public symbols, commemorations, and rituals. PRC scholars argue that everyday symbols — flags, holidays, public ceremonies — play an important role in shaping emotional attachment to the state. Post-unification governance is therefore expected to promote national symbols and integrate Taiwan into the PRC’s calendar of political rituals.
In PRC thinking on unification, economic integration occupies a dual role. On the surface, it is framed as a mechanism for restoring growth, stabilising livelihoods, and demonstrating the material benefits of national unity, though Taiwan is already a prosperous country. At a deeper level, however, economic integration is increasingly understood as political infrastructure. It is a set of structural dependencies, incentive systems, and governance mechanisms designed to shape behaviour, constrain resistance, and embed Taiwan within the PRC’s order over time.
Earlier approaches to cross-Strait economic engagement often rested on the relatively straightforward assumption that economic interdependence would soften political opposition by raising the costs of resistance and fostering shared interests. One analysis from Tsinghua University’s Institute for Cross-Strait Development documents how PRC policy has shifted since the 1980s, from initially pursuing economic integration as an organic path to political convergence to using integration as a political instrument, as the DPP's rise to power made spontaneous convergence implausible. Contemporary PRC writings are more cautious. While economic integration remains central, it is no longer treated as a sufficient condition for political loyalty. Instead, it is seen as an enabling platform that can support political control and identity transformation but cannot substitute for them.
This does not imply the wholesale abandonment of free markets and prosperity as goals, but it does imply a willingness to accept economic distortion if this serves broader political ends. PRC authors are explicit that the objective of integration is not simply market efficiency but the construction of durable dependencies.
The most significant articulation of this logic is the September 2023 CCP Central Committee and State Council directive establishing Fujian as a cross-Strait integrated development demonstration zone. The directive deploys a three-part formula to “promote integration through connectivity, through material benefits, [and] through emotional bonds" that is notable precisely for its sequencing: physical and institutional connectivity first, then economic incentives, then the cultivation of identification.
Chinese analysts frequently argue that Taiwan’s advanced economy, technological sophistication, and global market integration make it both valuable and risky. On the one hand, Taiwan’s industrial base, particularly in high-value manufacturing and services, is viewed as a strategic asset that could strengthen China’s overall economic resilience. On the other, Taiwan’s economic autonomy and global embeddedness are seen as sources of political leverage and resistance. Economic integration is therefore designed not simply to connect markets but to reconfigure power relationships.
Rather than across-the-board liberalisation or immediate harmonisation, integration is envisioned as a calibrated process that prioritises politically salient sectors, firms, and social groups. The objective is to create asymmetric dependencies — relationships in which Taiwan’s economic actors rely increasingly on mainland markets, regulatory approval, and institutional access, while the central authorities retain discretionary control.
This logic is most clearly articulated in discussions of trade and supply chains. Research by Sheng Jiuyuan and colleagues at Shanghai Jiaotong University found that cross-Strait supply chain integration, while historically deep, has been weakening since the US–China trade war and Covid-era decoupling pressures. In response, they call for policy intervention to stabilise and deepen dependencies before they erode further. Post-unification policy is accordingly expected to prioritise realigning Taiwan's industrial networks with mainland supply chains, particularly in strategically important sectors. By harmonising standards, regulations, and logistics systems with mainland norms, PRC authors argue, Taiwan’s firms would face increasing costs if they sought to disengage or relocate. Over time, this integration is expected to reduce the feasibility of economic exit as a form of political resistance.
Labour mobility is treated similarly. Employment opportunities, professional accreditation, and career advancement pathways linked to the mainland are viewed as mechanisms for reshaping incentives, particularly among younger and mid-career professionals. Economic integration in this sense is not merely about jobs, but about embedding individuals within institutional and social networks aligned with PRC authority. The Fujian demonstration zone's provisions for Taiwan residents, which include public housing, healthcare enrolment, and educational access on terms equivalent to mainland residents, represent the operational form of this policy, with a goal of converting material benefits into institutional attachment.
Even if unification is able to deliver material benefits to the Taiwanese, which is doubtful, Chinese analysts explicitly caution against assuming this will translate into political loyalty, a scepticism informed by Hong Kong’s experience, where deep economic integration and rising living standards failed, in the eyes of PRC scholars, to prevent the political mobilisation of anti-Beijing forces. Thus, without parallel efforts in institutional restructuring, identity engineering, and security governance, economic measures alone will not neutralise resistance.
There is also recognition of the risk that economic integration could, of itself, generate fresh grievances. Regulatory harmonisation may disadvantage certain sectors or regions; labour mobility may increase competition and social tension; and the presence of large Chinese state-owned enterprises and industrial policy may crowd out local, private firms. If these effects are perceived as unilaterally imposed or unfair, they may undermine or offset the legitimacy of integration efforts.
International exposure further complicates economic pacification. Taiwan’s economy is deeply embedded in global markets, no more so than in the semiconductor sector.
Like the issue of identity, PRC writings consistently emphasise that economic integration is a long-term project that carries significant risks. Sustaining coherent economic strategy over decades requires administrative capacity, fiscal resources, and policy consistency. Economic shocks, external crises, or changes in leadership priorities may disrupt integration plans.
There is also an implicit tension between short-term stabilisation and long-term integration. Measures taken to secure control in the immediate post-unification period, such as capital controls or security-driven regulation, may well undermine investor confidence and dampen Taiwan’s economic growth. Balancing political discipline with economic vitality is a recurring concern in PRC writings, and one for which no clear solution is offered.
Neither the party-state nor Chinese scholars have attempted to lay out a detailed plan in public for how Beijing would attempt to co-opt and manage the crown jewel of the Taiwanese economy, TSMC, and the industrial cluster that surrounds the world’s most dominant and advanced manufacturer of semiconductors. In some ways, this is not surprising. There is no evidence that Beijing’s designs on Taiwan are driven by a desire to control TSMC. Beijing’s appetite to capture the island “would be just as strong if Taiwan was a poor, agrarian society”, according to one US analyst. In any case, TSMC would not survive without essential inputs from companies in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands, which would disappear in the event of a Chinese takeover.
Having said that, Chinese scholars understand the value of Taiwan’s advanced tech industries. Beijing does not need to nationalise companies like TSMC to control them and leverage their strengths. That can be done through controlling the export of chips, or by leveraging the supply of critical minerals that China itself controls. In this respect, TSMC and other Taiwanese tech companies are seen as invaluable tools in “strategic decoupling” from the United States and its allies.
One high-profile Chinese scholar, Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing, well known for his provocative commentary, warned that if unification was achieved through military conflict, then “One Country, Two Systems” would go out the window. “Logically speaking … some industries might be taken back, possibly including TSMC,” under the direct control of a Taiwan provincial party committee, he said.
Finally, PRC thinking about Taiwan after unification has increasingly been situated within a broader conceptual framework of a “super-large state”. This framework reflects a core premise of contemporary Chinese political theory that the country’s size, population, regional diversity, and uneven development require approaches fundamentally different from those of smaller or more homogeneous states. Within this logic, diversity is not an aberration to be eliminated, nor a justification for federalism or political decentralisation, but a condition to be managed through differentiated rule under a highly centralised authority.
The idea of a federation has superficial attractions, but it runs against the grain of the Chinese party-state. A federation implies the delegation of set powers to a province or a state according to formal constitutional arrangements. But since Beijing abhors what it calls “constitutionalism”, as it diminishes by law the leading role of the Party, that idea will not fly. Likewise, if Taiwan were to become a state in a Chinese federation, that could encourage nominally autonomous regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, and multiple other distinct localities, to demand the same status.
Nonetheless, some Chinese scholars have advocated a quasi-federation to bring Taiwan under sovereign control. In 2001, Wu Jiaxiang, a former adviser to Hu Yaobang — variously party chairman and general secretary between 1981 and 1987, and considered one of China’s most liberal leaders in the reform era — said Taiwan could be allotted positions at the top of the Beijing party-state. Similarly, Wang Yingjin, the then director of the Cross-Strait Relations Research Center at Renmin University in Beijing, writing in 2009, and Lin Gang, the director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University, both argued for a quasi-federal system. By 2023, in line with Xi’s hardening stance, Wang had changed his tune. “A high level of autonomy is not inherent to the Taiwan Special Administrative Zone,” he wrote. “Rather, it is given [to Taiwan] by the central government through law.”
Rather than being treated as a future province equivalent to existing administrative units, or as a permanently autonomous polity within a federal system, Taiwan is framed as a special governance zone within a mega-state that requires tailored institutional arrangements, heightened political oversight, and long-term management. This allows Beijing to reconcile two otherwise competing objectives: acknowledging Taiwan’s distinctiveness while rejecting any claim to equal political status or shared sovereignty. Chinese scholars argue that China’s territorial, demographic, economic, and social scale renders many Western governance models inapplicable.
PRC writings on post-unification governance of Taiwan reflect a serious effort to anticipate the challenges of ruling a politically distinct society. Chinese scholars no longer assume that unification itself would resolve questions of legitimacy, identity, or stability. Instead, they acknowledge — often implicitly — that governance after unification would be prolonged, contested, and resource-intensive. Yet despite this growing realism, PRC thinking remains marked by a set of unresolved contradictions and open questions.
The most persistent contradiction concerns the role of autonomy. On the one hand, Chinese scholars consistently acknowledge that Taiwan’s political, social, and economic distinctiveness requires differentiated governance. Uniform application of mainland institutions is widely viewed as impractical and destabilising. Autonomy — whether described as “high degree”, “special arrangements”, or “differentiated rule” — is presented as a necessary concession to reality.
On the other hand, PRC literature is unequivocal that autonomy cannot constrain central authority. Autonomy is defined as delegated, conditional, and revocable. It cannot include veto power, constitutional entrenchment, or independent sources of political legitimacy. The centre must retain the ability to intervene, reinterpret, and override local institutions whenever national security or political stability is deemed at risk.
This creates a fundamental tension. Autonomy is offered as a tool to reduce resistance, reassure elites, and facilitate governance, yet it is explicitly denied the legal or political credibility that might make it reassuring.
This contradiction is not lost on Chinese analysts. Some acknowledge that conditional autonomy may fail to generate trust or long-term buy-in, particularly in a society accustomed to rules-based governance. Yet few propose alternatives that would meaningfully constrain central authority. A stalemate emerges here, as autonomy is necessary but not credible, control is effective but destabilising, and no synthesis fully resolves the tension.
A second major contradiction concerns the relationship between stability and legitimacy. PRC writings place enormous emphasis on stability — defined as the absence of organised resistance, social disorder, or challenges to central authority. Stability is treated as both a prerequisite for governance and a justification for extraordinary measures. Security-first sequencing, permanent anti-separatism architecture, and pervasive oversight are all defended on the grounds that instability would threaten national unity and regime survival.
At the same time, Chinese scholars increasingly acknowledge that stability achieved through coercion does not equate to legitimacy. Compliance can be enforced, but acceptance cannot. A society may be quiet yet politically alienated; orderly yet psychologically resistant. This distinction is central to PRC concerns about Taiwan, where separate identities are deeply rooted over generations.
The trade-off between stability and legitimacy runs through nearly every aspect of post-unification planning. Measures that suppress dissent — surveillance, censorship, political vetting, and the constant threat of jail — may reduce short-term instability but undermine the social trust required for long-term integration. Institutional restructuring may align governance with PRC norms but hollow out institutions of credibility and competence. Identity engineering may promote national narratives but provoke backlash if perceived as cultural erasure.
A third contradiction concerns the risk of economic and human capital loss. PRC writings consistently recognise Taiwan’s economic sophistication and human capital as assets. At the same time, Chinese analysts acknowledge — often indirectly — that these assets are mobile. Capital, talent, and firms can relocate, disengage, or withhold participation in ways that degrade governance capacity. Taiwan’s professional class — engineers, academics, medical professionals, entrepreneurs — is central to its economic and social vitality. If large numbers left or disengaged, the consequences would extend beyond economics to include weakening of institutional capacity and innovation.
In practical terms, the most understated but consequential theme in PRC writings is governance fatigue. While rarely stated explicitly, many analyses hint at the administrative, fiscal, and political burden of sustained high-intensity rule that daily runs up against Taiwan’s democratic traditions.
Post-unification governance as envisioned in PRC literature is not light-touch. It requires permanent security presence, extensive surveillance, continuous political vetting, institutional oversight, and active identity management. These measures demand resources, coordination, and bureaucratic capacity over decades. They also require sustained political attention at the centre. Applied to Taiwan, this raises the possibility of long-term stagnation rather than integration.
These internal contradictions point to several unresolved questions in PRC thinking about Taiwan after unification.
Taken together, these questions suggest that PRC planning for post-unification governance is robust in its diagnosis of challenges but unable to grapple with solutions. The contradictions are not accidental; they reflect the structural tension between ruling a democratic society and imposing an authoritarian political order.
Beijing increasingly understands the scale and complexity of the challenge it would face yet remains bound by political and ideological constraints that limit its ability to resolve core tensions. Autonomy is necessary but untrustworthy; control is effective but corrosive; stability is achievable, but legitimacy remains elusive. Any success would be costly, contested, and uncertain over the long term. At worst, there could be a total breakdown of civil and political order.
In this sense, the hardest problem for Beijing is not in taking Taiwan, but in governing it. Whether the PRC can reconcile the demands of control with the need for legitimacy remains the central unanswered question in its Taiwan strategy.
This report was co-funded by the Lowy Institute and RAND. RAND is a research organisation that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s work on this effort was independently initiated and conducted by the RAND China Research Center, using a gift from philanthropist Michael Tang, as well as gifts from other RAND supporters and income from operations. RAND donors and grantors have no influence over research findings or recommendations.
About the authors
Richard McGregor
Richard McGregor was Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, and a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia.
Jude Blanchette
Jude Blanchette is the Distinguished Tang Chair in China Research at RAND, and the inaugural director of the RAND China Research Center.
Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
