60723 }
Military Confrontation with the United States
Faulty Assumptions and Lessons Learned
Early in 1996, PLA lobbying for a campaign of forward-leaning military dem-
onstrations designed to intimidate Taiwan’s emerging democratic electorate
combined with deep bitterness within the Politburo toward recent shifts in
US Taiwan policy to produce the first military confrontation between the PRC
and the United States since 1967, before China withdrew its forces from North
Vietnam. These PLA military demonstrations were based on two assump-
tions. First, that a credible threat of war with China would cause Taiwan’s
newly enfranchised electorate to move away from what Beijing declared to
be “Taiwan independence.” Second, that the United States would not inter-
vene forcefully and effectively to shield Taiwan from PLA threats, and that
this clarification of Taiwan’s actual vulnerability would induce Taiwan’s elec-
torate to embrace a more prudent path of accepting Beijing’s “one country,
two systems” proposal. Both assumptions turned out to be wrong. PLA in-
timidation angered Taiwan’s voters, helping produce a landslide election for
Lee Teng-hui, whom Beijing judged a “splittist.” And the United States inter-
vened forcefully, resulting in the third US-PRC confrontation since 6-4.
The shock of face-to-face confrontation with US military power for the first
time in twenty-eight years interacted with the sobering US victory over Iraq
only five years earlier to produce a “never again” resolution among China’s
leaders. Never again would China confront the United States from a position
of military weakness. Instead, China would develop the military capabilities
to match the United States in a war over Taiwan. The result was a push for
carefully targeted military capabilities that could deny US forces access to the
Taiwan area for the period of time necessary to bring Taiwan under PLA con-
trol. Over the next two decades, that push would significantly transform the
PRC-US military balance in the Western Pacific. After 1996, Chinese plan-
ning for a Taiwan contingency assumed US entry, with Chinese capabilities
designed to defeat that intervention.