China has been looking to annex Taiwan for many years, and recently their tensions have skyrocketed. Firstly, let’s look at what that means. To annex is to add to. China wants to invade Taiwan and make their land its own. Taiwan is an island separate from the mainland of China. Taiwan split from the mainland of China in 1949 amid civil war. Since then, Communist Party elites and Chairman Xi Jinping have viewed unifying Taiwan as making China great again.

The United States currently stands as the biggest obstacle preventing Beijing from invading Taiwan. Biden has claimed on a few occasions that the US would defend Taiwan if China ever tried to attack them. In 2020, former president Trump and his administration provided Taiwan with $5.1 billion in weapons sales. A spokesman for the Pentagon, John Supple stated that their support and defense relationship with Taiwan remains aligned against the threat posed by the PROC (People’s Republic of China). It has become increasingly clear that the United States’ loyalties are with Taiwan, and if China were to try to attack, they would have a much larger scale battle.

On the other hand, The US is a part of the One China policy, implemented in 1979 under former president Jimmy Carter. Under this policy, the US acknowledges that it has formal ties with China instead of Taiwan. However, this policy does not mean an endorsement of Beijing’s position. The US has still been able to have “robust unofficial” relations with Taiwan. The US also has a Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which preserves “extensive, close, and friendly commercial, cultural, and other relations between the people of the United States and the people on Taiwan…”. This means that the US must uphold almost a balancing act, and they have been doing so perfectly for a long time.

Beijing claims Taiwan is one of China’s provinces and wants to retake it. Taiwan’s government claims to be a sovereign nation and does not need to declare independence. Beijing has threated numerous times to use force against Taiwan if it ever formally declares independence. Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen wrote that Taiwan would “do whatever it takes” to defend itself.