War with China may be coming, but not quite yet, according to U.S. officials who have been hitting snooze on a countdown to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2027. Now they think it won’t happen before 2028. The year is symbolic; 2027 is the centennial of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and a year in which Xi Jinping likely plans to claim a fourth uncontested term as the country’s most powerful leader in a generation.
He needs something to show for it, the theory goes. It matters to the United States because democratically governed Taiwan, which China has long claimed as its own, is a top trading partner and the world’s leading supplier of advanced computer chips. A Taiwan Strait crisis would crush the global economy and take America down with it, current and former U.S. officials have warned.
But U.S. officials believe Beijing isn’t ready to attack its democratic neighbor, based on their latest reading of the tea leaves, despite what they say is Xi’s order for the PLA to be capable of launching such a mission next year. The question they ought to be asking is whether China’s leaders were ever willing to risk it all in the first place. It was nearly six years ago that Admiral Philip Davidson, then in charge of the U.S.
Pacific Command, warned that a Taiwan Strait crisis could happen before the end of the decade, possibly in 2027. His testimony in 2021 in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee became the strategic time frame known as the "Davidson window." His warning was part of a budget request to fund more defensive preparations in the Pacific, where front-line U.S. territory such as Guam could become targets of preemptive Chinese missile strikes to deter U.S. involvement. Two years later, Bill Burns, then-director of the CIA, reaffirmed the 2027 timeline but said having the military capability wasn’t the same as having the political intent to use it.
Later, other former U.S. officials including former defense chief Lloyd Austin and Admiral John Aquilino—Davidson’s successor—said a conflict with China was neither imminent nor inevitable. The significance of 2027 didn’t come from nowhere, however. China’s goal is to modernize the PLA by next year.
By 2035, it wants a modern, high-tech fighting force capable of winning a regional conflict. And by 2049—the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China—Beijing wants a "world-class" military to rival the United States. China’s own operational challenges in the event of an invasion of Taiwan are huge and have been known for decades.
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