Xi can take Taiwan without a military conflict. So why isn't he?

There could be two reasons why China is not looking at a political integration of Taiwan.

The Chinese have been trying to din it into the Americans: Beijing will never compromise on Taiwan's integration with the Mainland. And the Americans don't want to hear that.

But here is another question. The Chinese can easily take over Taiwan politically by stirring up a political unrest and rebellion. And the Americans would be able to do little about it. But Xi Jinpeng seems to be ignoring that option as much as Joe Biden seems to be ignoring Xi's repeated warnings about the Taiwan question.

That would be the best route for Beijing to take over Taiwan. Probably bloodless, or with comparatively less bloodshed. No harm to China's economy from sanctions and other punitive measures from the West and its allies. 

But Beijing seems disinterested in following that route. Despite it holding enough economic clout to squeeze Taiwan's economy and then provoke political unrest through its proxies. It can't be that Beijing does not have, or cannot find, such proxies in Taiwan. The two countries share a lot of history in common and it would need only a little bit of political shenanigans and some discrete financing to get an uprising going.

There could be two reasons why China is not looking at that option. The first, and probably the weaker one, is that Beijing wants to keep the tensions alive for longer. Every government needs a hot-button issue to keep its flock together. More so authoritarian regimes. So keeping the Taiwan issue on the boil may well serve Xi to keep his people distracted from the economic pain China is going through.

But that theory ignores that the economic pain is not something an authoritarian regime would worry about much. And with its economic clout China can better weather any blow to its economy better than, say, a Russia under Putin. But even Putin's Russia has shown how resilient it is to western sanctions that just a year ago were thought to deal a body blow to its economy.

So the second reason for Xi's disinterest in attempting a political integration of Taiwan seems more plausible: Beijing is so confident of its military and economic power that it is not scared of U.S. military might. And by holding on the confrontation course Beijing calculates that it will emerge a winner from two possible outcomes.

One, there will be a shooting war over Taiwan and, Beijing expects, with all the missiles and forces it has amassed on the Mainland, America will be defeated. Xi probably has factored in some kind of military damage but probably calculates that the prestige of defeating the U.S. military and the result of a redrawn geopolitical map will more than compensate for that. It could lead to China becoming the preeminent power in the world, ending the West's free run that started after world war 2.

Now the second possibility could be even better: the U.S. and its allies will turn tail and flee, faced with the prospect of a damaging clash with the Chinese military.

Again, the benefits are all China's.

But wait, what if China loses to the U.S. in such a clash? Xi probably is not even considering such a possibility existing; or would still think that any clash where China can inflict significant damage to the U.S. military would still be beneficial to Beijing, whatever its outcome.

So we are probably seeing a building blocks of an intense military conflict in the South China Sea. Beijing seems to want one; and the U.S. is still under the hangover of the decades when it had unquestioned military superiority over the globe.

And change is inveitable.