The lawmaker said the world must take the CCP’s plan seriously and prepare for a potential attack.
The United States must act as if the Chinese regime’s ambition to annex Taiwan by 2027 is a “realistic potential,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said on Thursday.
It follows a recent
remark by the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Anthony J. Cotton, at an annual defense conference that Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s goal to invade Taiwan in 2027 has driven the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) investment “in land, sea, and air based nuclear delivery platforms, and infrastructure necessary to support a major buildup of their nuclear forces.”
Meanwhile, rumors of escalated purges within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the past weeks have
raised questions on how the CCP’s internal power struggle will impact the regime’s decision-making on Taiwan.
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Perry said taking Taiwan by 2027 has always been the CCP’s goal, and the world “needs to take that seriously” rather than assuming the CCP will be unable or unwilling to carry out the plan.
“We have to proceed in everything that we do and say, in every decision we make, as though that’s a realistic potential,” he said.
Perry, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a retired Army brigadier general, is among the 28 lawmakers who backed a
resolution in February calling for normalized
diplomatic relations between the United States and Taiwan.
“We ought to signal very loudly that we do not accept China’s narrative and China’s coercion to try and get—slowly—the rest of the world to just accept that China is going to take over Taiwan,” he said, adding that the United States should “publicly” recognize “the diplomatic efforts and the sovereignty of Taiwan.”
Taiwan’s official name, the Republic of China, was the name of mainland China between 1912 and 1949, before the Kuomintang government lost the civil war to the CCP and was forced to retreat to Taiwan.
The CCP has never ruled Taiwan, but it aims to “unify” with the island, by peaceful means or by force. The regime has
sabotaged Taiwan’s diplomatic relations and blocked its participation in international organizations. It insists the world should follow its “One China” principle, which claims that the communist regime is the only legitimate government on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Washington
holds an alternative “One China” policy that acknowledges but doesn’t endorse the CCP’s position.
Since Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te took office last year, the Chinese regime has stepped up its rhetoric against so-called Taiwan separatists, and declared that “diehard” support of Taiwan independence can be
punishable by death.
It has also ramped up
military and patrol activities in the Taiwan Strait in recent years, sending PLA or coast guard aircraft and ships to the Strait nearly on a daily basis.
In 2023, then-CIA Director William Burns
cited U.S. intelligence, saying Xi had ordered the PLA to be ready for invading Taiwan by 2027.
In an email interview with The Epoch Times, retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel Lawrence Sellin said Beijing has so far “pursued a ‘salami-slice strategy’ using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger result.”
The regime appears to be reluctant to launch an attack or a blockade because such actions “would cause an immediate strong reaction from the United States and regional powers opposed to China’s unlawful expansionism, possibly provoking a major war,” he said, adding, “but that could change.”
Last year, Yuan Hongbing, a former law professor at China’s prestigious Peking University, who has connections in the CCP’s upper echelon, said party leaders were
advised to establish a strategy to “solve the Taiwan issue by 2027” in a report penned by top PLA experts.
According to Yuan, the report described the goal as a “political guarantee” for the CCP’s 21st National Congress, which is set for 2027, to go smoothly, suggesting CCP elites have banked the party’s legitimacy on absorbing the self-ruled island.
Meanwhile, the recent
disappearance of the PLA’s third in command, second-ranked vice chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, Gen. He Weidong, has
led to speculations on whether Xi is losing grip on power, and whether a coup would accelerate or hamper the CCP’s plan to invade Taiwan.
On how the United States should react, Perry said anything that hampers the CCP’s oppression of the Chinese people and slows the spread of communism around the world is “a good thing,” but the United States can’t “just sit back and hope that that occurs organically.”
