Xi Jinping fears Taiwan invasion could cost him power, never raised AUKUS with Australia, says former envoy

Australia’s last ambassador to China says Xi Jinping is overseeing a Leninist dictatorship but is nowhere near ready to attack Taiwan because he fears being deposed if the military fails.

The Chinese President has said he wants the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready to unify the democratically ruled island with the mainland from as early as next year.

But Graham Fletcher, who served in Beijing as Australia’s Ambassador during the pandemic and the breakdown of relations between the former Coalition government and the Communist regime, said President Xi was not poised to strike anytime soon.

“I’m pretty sure China’s not ready,” Mr Fletcher told The Nightly in an extended interview to discuss the release of his paper for the Lowy Institute on the state of the bilateral relationship.

“Use of force is not their preferred course of action. That’s the last resort after everything else has failed.”

China has stepped up the frequency and intensity of its military operations around Taiwan and analysts say the activity mimics dress rehearsals for how the PLA could blockade Taiwan.

This has prompted speculation among China watchers that the CCP does not want to carry out a high-risk invasion but instead wants to cut off the island from the rest of the world and deny it access to military support and essential resources, including food and energy.

The blockade scenario is also considered more attractive to China as it could make it harder for the United States and allies to calibrate their response if the Chinese do not trigger outright military action first.

But Mr Fletcher said it was unlikely that the CCP would begin that course of action without being prepared to go the whole way.

“No, they wouldn’t start a blockade unless they were prepared to follow through with an invasion. Because what happens if the blockade doesn’t work?” he said.

“There’s too much heated rhetoric about it’s about to happen, and it’s not. Sure, they’re doing lots of stuff, pressuring exercises, you name it, but I don’t think there’s a timeline in Beijing that they’re working towards.

“It’s a very difficult thing to mount an invasion across that Strait, and I don’t think the military people in our system think that they think that they can do it. Once they get to a position where they think ‘yes, we could’ then that makes things a bit more dicey.

“So in my mind, Xi Jinping is only 73, he probably feels he’s got another 10 to 15, possibly even 20 years at the top. I would be worried if he were in his mid-80s, meaning, I think he might feel that the pressure of time is getting to him.”

Earlier this year, former Defence chief Angus Campbell, who is now Australia’s Ambassador to NATO and the European Union, said any invasion of Taiwan was still a way off.

But former prime minister and China scholar Kevin Rudd is among those who think President Xi could move on Taiwan while US President Donald Trump is in office.

“I’m worried very much that Xi Jinping could miscalculate in 2028,” Mr Rudd recently told The New York Times, citing the Taiwanese presidential elections that year.

“And he’s aware that 2028 is a presidential election year here in the United States.

“What do I fear? A miscalculation by Xi Jinping about the level of American resolve. Do the Chinese conclude post-Iran, for example, that the likelihood of any American leadership to deploy forces in the event of a Taiwan crisis would be reduced as a result of the Iran experience?

“And then there’s the more mechanical question of the extent to which the American arsenal depth, magazine depth and capability set have been impaired as a result of Iran.

“So my concern as an analyst is: Could he arrive at a conclusion through a bout of excessive self-confidence that a unique opportunity has arisen?”

Mr Trump has said that he believes President Xi will not attack Taiwan while he remains in the White House. His term expires at the end of January 2029. He has also disputed US reporting of a widespread munitions shortage due to the six-month war that is continuing against Iran.

The recently published book Regime Change, co-authored by Australian-born US journalist Jonathan Swan, cites sources close to Mr Trump saying the US President’s position on whether or not to defend Taiwan against China boiled down to: “Why would I send American troops to fight a war over a tiny island that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map?”

President Xi has been purging top military officials, but it is not known why. Mr Rudd is among those who have speculated that this could be a dismissal of generals who are telling President Xi that China should not attack Taiwan.

But Mr Fletcher said the reasons for the purges were still unknown.

“There’s one theory that perhaps they were telling him unwelcome news that he didn’t want to hear, but as far as I know, there’s no information to support that, it’s just a hypothesis,” he said.

“I think Trump makes something less likely than more because he’s so unpredictable. Possibly, he might give it to them. Not that he can.

“It is such a high-risk thing for Xi Jinping that if he attempted it and it didn’t work quickly. I think he’d be gone. I don’t think his colleagues would allow him to sit there like Putin does, presiding over a frozen conflict or something that hasn’t worked.

“So, it’s such a big gamble, I can’t see him attempting it until (he is) absolutely dead certain, and it’s necessary because everything else has failed, everything else hasn’t failed.”

Mr Fletcher has been posted to Beijing three times. His last stint came during the nadir of Australia-China bilateral relations when the former Coalition government called for an inquiry into the COVID pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China.

China cut off communication with Australia and hit producers with $20 billion worth of tariffs, which were lifted when Labor came into power, aiming to “stabilise” the relationship.

The Prime Minister has met President Xi four times, twice during visits to China. During Mr Albanese’s first term, the government successfully secured the release of Chinese-born Australian journalist and writer Cheng Lei, who was detained in Beijing on fake charges for three years and two months.

But China’s navy has also circumnavigated Australia for the first time, conducted live-fire exercises between Australia and New Zealand, and last month test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific.

However, Mr Fletcher said that was part of China’s broader strategic behaviour and that when it came to the Australia-China relationship, it had hit a “sweet spot”.

“It’s recovered to a position of — it’s back on track,” he said.

“Where we are at the moment is a kind of a sweet spot, where we’re able to successfully prosecute our defensive interests against China, and also the positive interests.

“If you talk to DFAT, they’ll never answer the question honestly, but if you said to them how often does China protest what we’re saying and doing in terms of strategic matters? I reckon it’s every week to 10 days.

“Certainly, when I was in Beijing, it was every week or so, we would have a formal representation from the foreign ministry saying you have said this so and so and that’s not correct, and you need to smarten up.”

But he said, despite China’s opposition to AUKUS, Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK was never once raised with him.

“China was vigorously, and they still are as far as I know, trying to stop AUKUS through the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) through regional opposition, you name it,” he said.

“They were trying to get all of Southeast Asia up in arms about it — how dare you, how dare Australia get this capability, it’s proliferation, it’s step one of getting to nuclear weapons, blah, blah, blah.

“And that’s very obvious, and in Vienna at the IAEA, they’re always trying to create trouble there, but … it was never raised as a bilateral problem between Beijing and Canberra, at least not while I was there; I doubt that it has since either.”