Everybody knows about the backstory, there was a civil war, KMT fled to Taiwan creating two Chinas sort of, maybe, neither recognises the other, whole thing. ROC (Taiwan) ended up transitioning from military rule to a multi-party democracy, while the PRC (mainland China) didn't do that (they did reform economically, "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and all that, but still a one-party state, not a multi-party democracy). The status quo right now is that Taiwan is in the grey area of statehood where they function pretty much independently but aren't properly recognised, and both sides of the strait are feeling pretty tense right now.
Taiwan's stance on the issue is that they would like to remain politically and economically independent of mainland China, retaining their multi-party democracy, political connections to its allies, economic trade connections, etc. Also, a majority of the people in Taiwan do not support reunification with China.
China's stance on the issue is that Taiwan should be reunified with the mainland at all costs, ideally peacefully, but war is not ruled out. They argue that Taiwan was unfairly separated from the mainland by imperial powers in their "century of humiliation". Strategically, taking Taiwan would be beneficial to China as they would have better control of the sea.
Is it even possible for both sides to agree to a peaceful solution? Personally, I can only see two ways this could go about that has the consent of both parties. One, a reformist leader takes power in the mainland and gives up on Taiwan, and the two exist as separate independent nations. Or two, the mainland gets a super-reformist leader that transitions the mainland to a multi-party democracy, and maybe then reunification could be on the table, with Taiwan keeping an autonomous status given the large cultural difference (similar to Hong Kong or Macau's current status). Both options are, unfortunately, very unlikely to occur in the near future.
A third option (?) would be a pseudo-unification, where Taiwan becomes a recognised country, but there can be free movement of people between the mainland and Taiwan, free trade, that sort of stuff (sort of like the EU? Maybe?). Not sure if the PRC would accept that.
What are your thoughts on a peaceful solution to the crisis that both sides could agree on?
edit: Damn there are crazies in both ends of the arguments. I really don't think giving Taiwan nukes would help solve the problem.
I think the current best solution, looking at the more reasonable and realistic comments, seems to be to maintain the status quo, at least until both sides of the strait are able to come into some sort of agreement (which seems to be worlds away right now given their current very opposing stances on the issue)
A peaceful and realistic solution? Taiwan develops a strategic nuclear deterrent. They're already a near-nuclear country and an industrial and technological powerhouse. A nuclear bomb is fully within their capability, and they already have abundant supplies of all the precursor materials in their possession. The most realistic solution to the Taiwan crisis is that Taiwan obtains nuclear weapons, and China is never able to threaten them with invasion again.
Taiwan trying to develop nuclear weapons would be the fastest way to get themselves invaded. China would put a stop to it before it they could even say "nuclear deterrent".
Wouldn’t that mean China and US would be at war? I don’t think the Chinese would want that.
Yeah, because nukes in what MacArthur called their "unsinkable aircraft carrier", knowing how uhh trigger happy America is, is not the better option, lol.
And yet, plenty of other countries have managed to do it...
Have you looked into the context of how they were able to do it and how difficult stopping them would have been?
If North Korea could do it, so can Taiwan.
North Korea has a million artillery pieces and like 20 million people ready to call back to service, and China would probably get involved if the alternative is a hostile puppet state on their border. The calculus of invading NK is quite different than Taiwan.
Which ones were a small island country that had a massively more powerful hostile neighbour looking right over their shoulder when developing their nuclear weapons?
North Korea did it, and it had the United States, the nation with the most powerful surveillance capabilities in the world looking right over its shoulder. And keep in mind, we're still technically at war with North Korea. And North Korea might as well be an island. But really, the island part is irrelevant here, as Taiwan already possesses all the nuclear material it would need. It has a well developed nuclear power sector. The island gets half its electricity from nuclear power. And they have several research reactors. It already has all the fissile material it needs to build a bomb.
History has proven otherwise.
It turns out, that while everyone says that arms races and escalation lead to conflict... Actually, what we've seen is that waiving a big stick is the only true deterrent.
That sounds like a surefire way for Taiwan to get invaded, since I'm very certain that China does not want more nuclear missiles pointed at it, much less by Taiwan right off its coast. Taiwan might end up like Iran (who the U.S. claimed were developing nukes)
If Taiwan does end up developing nukes without the knowledge of China or other major powers, then you could argue that nuclear deterrance would work. But the intelligence systems of all the global powers is incredibly advanced now, so it would probably be difficult for Taiwan to covertly do something like that (esp given that we know both sides send spies to each other)
Unless Taiwan can spend the trillions upon trillions of dollars and fully complete enough MIRV ICBMs to be able to absolutely saturate the entire country of China leaving no inch of land unscathed from nuclear fire, essentially ensuring MAD doctrine to deter an invasion, all without China discovering this, China won't tolerate a nuclear program and simply invade Taiwan so trivially with their unending human meat waves to destroy all hope of defense surrounding the island.
Taiwan doesn't need thousands of nuclear weapons to be a credible threat to China. A dozen bombs with delivery systems would be more than enough to make a credible deterrent. The goal isn't to be able to wipe out the entire population of mainland China. The goal would simply be to make any invasion so costly that the cost would vastly outweigh any potential gains. I don't know what all Xi hopes to gain by conquering Taiwan, but whatever it is, it's not worth losing the dozen largest Chinese cities in a series of mushroom clouds. To the Chinese leadership, the conquest of Taiwan is not worth getting Beijing nuked. Maybe Mao would have made that trade, back when China was a rural peasant nation. But now? China is the workshop of the world. The entire economy and China's place in the world are utterly dependent on its megacities.
ALL of those can be trivially intercepted with military tech from the mid-90's that China has in abundance (I love you internet armchair generals and the guile to be so wrong constantly), hence the modern necessity to create MIRVs which are impossible to track if enough are deployed.
I don't believe you actually need any of that. The thing is, nuclear weapons are scary. When it comes to fear, actually capabilities barely figure in. Because what if it gets through anyway? What if the west sells them a super advanced delivery system? What if they try something we didn't think of?
Better not risk it.
You know China has been building their military for this singular conflict since like 1949 right? They have an entire branch of their military dedicated to missiles.
The idea of WWI-style human meat waves getting applied to communist countries was literally nazi propaganda. China didn't cause the longest retreat in US history during the Korean war because suddenly WWI tactics started working against a military 50 years more advanced than the one that demonstrated human meat waves don't work.
Not Nazi propaganda. Literally what Russia does to this day...