Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

China yesterday simulated “sealing off” Taiwan during a third day of war games around the nation, while the US deployed a naval destroyer into the South China Sea in a show of force.

China launched the exercises on Saturday in response to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) meeting with US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week, an encounter it had said would provoke a furious response.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine grinds on into its second year, it continues to generate headlines as the largest land war in Europe since 1945. Yet 5,000 miles away, at the opposite end of the Eurasian land mass, a different conflict lies poised to ignite, kindled by another large country’s distortion of a shared cultural and ethnolinguistic heritage to threaten a smaller neighbor’s sovereignty.

Many headlines have also been written on the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to isolate and strangle the small but defiant democracy on the island of Taiwan. Yet many of these analyses fail to locate the sources of China’s obsession with its neighbor to the southeast. Any effort to neutralize Chinese aggression must begin with one question: why is China so obsessed with subduing a tiny nation of only 23 million people? Examining this question reveals four key motivators animating Beijing’s mania.