China's foreign minister warned the United States last week about its actions towards Taiwan: stay off Taiwan or face an unbearable price. The minister's warning came a couple of weeks after the U.S. invited Taiwan to its Democracy Summit, which Beijing perceived as Washington encouraging the island's independence. China considers Taiwan as its breakaway province and has stepped up the campaign to bring it back.
The U.S. violated the promises when China and the US established diplomatic relations, condoned and encouraged 'Taiwan independence forces, and tried to distort and hollow out the one-China principle, Wang Yi said last week in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV and official news agency Xinhua.
This will not only bring Taiwan into an extremely dangerous situation, but it will also cause the U.S. to face an unbeatable price. What does the strong language of China against the world's superpower made the circles of social media over the weekend an inevitable question: What does Beijing mean to the world unbearable? The foreign minister who made the statement has the exact answer. One of the answers is that the world unbearable has no meaning. It's just another harsh word that the Chinese regime uses to appease its nationalist base at home and intimidate Taiwan and its Asian neighbors.
Another answer is that the U.S. could suffer heavy casualties if it attempts to take over the island and enforce its one-China policy. The U.S. does not recognize Taiwan's independence under the Taiwan Relations Act, but it has reaffirmed its commitment to defend the island.
In recent months, China has stepped up military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, raising the speculation that Beijing is about to invade the island, which could pit it against the U.S.
Yannis Tsinas, a former Washington military diplomat, doesn't see this possibility.
China isn't ready to confront America yet, he said. It is no match for the American military, which has taken multiple missions in recent years like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Yugoslavia, and Islamic terrorism, where it has used modern weapons in the battlefield China has yet to develop such capabilities. Tsinas pointed to the $650 billion U.S. military budget, almost three times China's $250 billion budget.
He said that America's military spending, together with that of its allies, account for more than two-thirds of the world's military spending. It makes it extremely difficult for a nation to go against America and its allies. While Tsinas is ruling out an open military intervention by Beijing, he isn't ruling out the possibility that China will change the status quo in Taiwan by putting in place a pro-Beijing government, something like what it did in Hong Kong.
In that case, Beijing could rewrite the rules of competition for Taiwan's technology companies, which are at the core of the technology supply chain. Taiwan Semiconductors, for example, is the manufacturer of chips designed by many of America's semiconductor companies. What will happen if China imposes a ban on semiconductors from Taiwan to the U.S.? That would certainly be unbearable for the U.S. military machine that relies on these chips, the U.S. industries, and Wall Street, which doesn't seem prepared for it.