China Is Watching

The russian invasion is reshaping Beijing's plans to make Taiwan its own

- By John Feng. Photographs by David Brennan, Greg Baker, AFP and Getty

WHEN RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR Putin ordered the first of his 190,000 troops into Ukraine on February 24, the invasion had a seismic effect on Europe and the Western world. But tremors were also felt some 5,000 miles to the east: Taiwan rapidly became a trending topic.

For years, the world has speculated nervously on when President Xi Jinping will finally make good on the Chinese Communist Party's vow to annex Taiwan, a self-ruling island off the east coast of the People's Republic of China—an act that threatens to provide the spark that ignites a hot war between Beijing and Washington.

The developments in Ukraine offer Beijing a hazy window into its own future. Russia's many failures and miscalculations in its blitzkrieg, and its struggle to assert full control in Ukraine against a fierce, well-armed and highly motivated resistance, are tough meat for Xi's Taiwan planners to chew on.

So too is the unexpectedly unified and powerful Western response to Russia's aggression. Moscow now sits atop a pile of economic rubble because of devastating sanctions. As Russia counts the cost in rubles and bodies, Washington believes China's calculations about annexing Taiwan are changing as a result.

Putin's Prism

AS THE KREMLIN BROADCAST PUTIN'S PRE-RECORDED hour-long address in the February 21 prelude to the full-scale dawn invasion that followed three days later, his framing of Russians and Ukrainians as one people, and his argument that Ukraine's statehood was a demonstrable fiction and a mistake, likely sounded eerily familiar to those in Taiwan.