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British daily Financial Times claims Xi issued the warning in meeting with Ursula von der Leyen in April 2023.
China’s President Xi Jinping told European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen that Washington was trying to “goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan,” the Financial Times said on Saturday.
In a report based on information from people familiar with the matter, the British daily said Xi issued the warning in a meeting with von der Leyen in April 2023. She paid an official visit to China last year which coincided with the state visit of French President Emmanuel Macron.
According to the newspaper, Xi said the US was trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait.
The revelation comes as tensions are high across the Taiwan Strait. China responded to last month’s inauguration of Lai Ching-te as Taiwan’s new president with military drills around the island, which it claims as its own. Taipei, however, insists on its independence since 1949.
Xi’s remarks are probably the first known case of him making the claim to a foreign leader.
The Chinese leader also said that a conflict with the US would undermine his goal of achieving a “great rejuvenation” by 2049.
US officials have, in recent years, increased engagement with Taiwan but the administration says it remains committed to its longstanding one-China policy.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this month, Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun said the country’s military was ready to “forcefully” stop Taiwan’s independence.
Earlier, the Foreign Ministry said those supporting independence for Taiwan would find themselves “crushed.”
American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.
China is a regional power with nuclear capabilites, not a superpower. They lack both the conventional force projection and soft power capabilities of an actual superpower - and what little soft power China has ever had (which has always been less than that of several individual European nations on their own) has been decimated by Xi’s highly destructive “wolf warrior diplomacy”.
I also disagree with the claim that any war with China would immediately spark WW3. Neither Beijing nor Washington have an interest in this and for as irrational and delusional as Xi is, he’s not stupid enough to strike US mainland; if he ever made that suggestion, I’m sure that an army of far more intelligent advisors immediately tried to dissuade him from that using gentle enough language in order to not upset the emperor. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that a second Pearl Harbor would, even in this day and age, unite Democrats and Republicans against China. No amount of buying senators and riling up young voters through TikTok could counteract this.
I’m pretty certain - based on how similar China’s buildup and propaganda is to what Russia did in the years before invading Ukraine - that the Asian dictatorship is going to start a war over Taiwan in the coming years, but they would struggle enough with combating Taiwan alone, conducting the most challenging naval landing using armed forces that haven’t fought in any serious war (apart from a small regional conflict with Vietnam) since the early 1950s. They could have the most advanced weaponry in the world (which they clearly don’t) and the lack of institutional experience would still put them at a massive disadvantage against the sole superpower on the planet. For as many issues as the US has a country and as a society, they are currently defeating what was once believed to be the “second army in the world” using Ukrainian soldiers and largely obsolete and/or expired 1970s to 1990s weaponry using no more than 5% of their military expenditure (and even that figure is misleading, since most weapons sent over were already considered worthless to them). China, which has been commonly ranked below Russia in terms of capabilities (remember Russian units struggling with poor quality Chinese tires in Ukraine or are currently embarrassing themselves with running head-first into Ukrainian positions on Chinese golf carts?) would face current American equipment and (sorry Ukrainians) far better trained American soldiers, far more competent American command in a far more challenging environment against a nation that built up a military strong enough to fight and win several wars at the scale of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan at the same time - that’s what all those expensive carrier groups are for.
This would be a ridiculously uneven fight.
They might be able to score some cheap hits in the initial chaos (which would only rile up the American voting public as a few of their boys come home in coffins), but have no chance of maintaining that momentum. My guess is that a war against China would result in more American casualties than the war against Iraq, but far less than Vietnam. Chinese and Taiwanese casualties (especially civilian ones in case of the latter) would be horrific though, with potentially destabilizing effects for mainland China as the number of bodies become impossible to hide.
In previous discussions of this topic, there’s always someone who dropped the impressive tonnage of the Communist Party’s navy, which ignores that most are “coast guard” (i.e. vessels built for range, solely for the purpose of harassing fishing boats thousands of kilometers away, which lack weaponry and systems that would allow them to do anything more than look scary) would be near useless in an actual shooting war against a non-third-world military. That’s on top of countless issues inherent to the Chinese system, like enormous corruption (remember when it came out that fuel for ICBMs had been sold and swapped out for water?) and party-led governance that is entirely based on obedience and loyalty instead of competency, even more so than before since Xi took power. Nearly all issues that Russia is still experiencing in Ukraine would also hamper China against Taiwan, except that they would have to cross a giant moat instead of just rolling over the border. No amount of manufacturing capabilities (which would at least partially collapse without foreign help in case of a war) can help them with this.
There would be a massive global recession, you’re right on that (it would hit China the hardest right after Taiwan though, especially in the long run), and the danger of this war escalating into a nuclear one still exists, but based on everything I’ve read on this topic, it’s far from certain this would “immediately spark” a nuclear Holocaust. I’m just some random guy on the Internet though, so it’s your choice whether you take my word on it or not. I hope I’ve made my point clear.