Yuan Hongbing: Xi Still Treats Launching a Taiwan War as a Central Personal Objective

According to The Hill, U.S. acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 21, 2026, that the United States has paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan in order to preserve U.S. munitions stockpiles for the ongoing war against Iran. The day before, on May 20, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that he would speak directly with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te before deciding whether to authorize the package. The two developments together produced wide-ranging speculation about the state of U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation.

Vision Times spoke with Yuan Hongbing, an Australian-based Chinese-Australian legal scholar, former Peking University law professor, and longtime CCP analyst who has regularly disclosed information drawn from his network of contacts inside the Chinese system.

How to read the US pause on Taiwan arms sales

The acting Navy Secretary’s pause framing referenced munitions preservation. Asked whether other factors might be involved, Yuan offered a different reading.

“The acting Navy Secretary does not have final decision-making authority on this, but his statement pausing arms sales to Taiwan is plainly one of the political aftereffects of the Trump-Xi summit,” Yuan said. “As I’ve said in prior interviews, the Trump-Xi summit did not carry major international strategic significance. It was a diplomatic move conducted by Trump and Xi to resolve their respective political and economic crises.”

In Yuan’s reading, Trump’s domestic position has been complicated by the unresolved Iran war and by the political pressures of the approaching 2026 midterm elections. The Beijing summit, Yuan argued, was Trump’s attempt to extract economic and diplomatic benefits from the Xi regime that could ease his domestic constraints. After the summit, Trump made a series of public statements that generated concern in capitals across the world. He suggested Taiwanese independence advocacy could provoke Beijing into launching a Taiwan war, and described arms sales to Taiwan as a useful negotiating chip in U.S. talks with Beijing.

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Yuan pointed to the Reagan administration’s Six Assurances to Taiwan, issued in 1982. Among the six commitments, one explicitly stated that the United States would not enter into negotiations with Beijing on the question of arms sales to Taiwan. Yuan argued that almost every American president since Reagan has clearly understood that the source of cross-strait tension is the CCP’s strategic objective of absorbing free Taiwan, and not Taiwan’s pursuit of any particular political status. Whatever Taiwan does, Yuan said, Beijing maintains the annexation of Taiwan as state policy.

Trump’s recent statements have drawn strong domestic pushback, Yuan noted. Senior figures within the MAGA movement, alongside Republican and Democratic senators and members of Congress, have publicly criticized Trump’s framing of Taiwan and called for continued arms support. In Yuan’s assessment, Trump’s proposal to speak with Lai Ching-te is likely a response to that domestic political pressure.

What Yuan believes Lai Ching-te would tell Trump

Yuan offered a detailed reading of what Taiwan’s president would say in a phone call with Trump. The framing is Yuan’s analytical reading rather than reporting on any planned Lai statement, but it captures what Yuan describes as “the voice in the hearts of the Taiwanese people.”

In Yuan’s framing, Lai would tell Trump that the sole source of current instability in the Taiwan Strait is the CCP’s global expansion strategy under Xi Jinping and Beijing’s intent to destroy Taiwan’s sovereignty. Taiwan, Yuan said, has never issued any war provocation against the Chinese government. The claim that Taiwanese independence will trigger a cross-strait war is a key element of CCP cognitive warfare and a core message of Beijing’s external propaganda apparatus.

Lai would tell Trump, in Yuan’s reading, that Taiwanese desire for an independent state belonging to the Taiwanese people is a four-century-old aspiration and an inalienable natural right. Taiwanese pursuit of freedom and independence is not contingent on U.S. support. The Taiwanese hold to sovereignty independent of the CCP because they refuse to become the political slaves of a totalitarian regime, and because that sovereignty is the only mechanism by which the Taiwanese can preserve their democratic way of life and their right to decide their own future.

Yuan added that Lai would tell Trump that strengthening Taiwanese defense is the only correct policy for deterring a Taiwan Strait war. Taiwan’s existence, Yuan argued Lai would tell Trump, benefits global peace, and a Beijing absorption of Taiwan would be a major setback for the twenty-first-century human freedom and democracy project. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Nov. 7, 2025 statement in the Japanese Diet that a Taiwan emergency could constitute a survival-threatening situation for Japan was, in Yuan’s framing, a brave and strategically sound assessment. The implication runs further: a Taiwan emergency is also a U.S. emergency and an emergency for the entire democratic project.

Yuan concluded that Lai would tell Trump that Taiwan, in any sense, is not a negotiating chip, but a free democratic country with an independent national identity and strong national dignity, and no one should treat it as a political bargaining tool.

Yuan added a separate observation. For Taiwan itself, he argued, the most important task at the moment is not to speculate about whether Trump will or will not call Lai. The task is to build the national self-confidence to know that Taiwan has both the capacity and the will to face any national danger independently.

Yuan: Xi wants to match Mao through a Taiwan war

After the Trump visit to Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in the Chinese capital on May 20 for his own summit with Xi, the Xinhua News Agency reported. In the meeting, Xi described the China-Russia relationship as “a key constant amid changes in the global landscape” and called for “all-around strategic coordination” between the two countries. Reports surfaced that Xi may visit North Korea as early as this coming week.

Yuan offered the following analysis of Beijing’s diplomatic activity. “Putin’s visit to Beijing is just a surface phenomenon. Behind that phenomenon are several important realities. First, the contemporary axis of evil, anchored on the CCP-Russia alliance, has effectively formed. The CCP is now attempting to construct a position of systemic confrontation with the United States. Putin’s visit to Beijing is an important step in strengthening this evil alliance. Xi’s upcoming North Korea visit and a Pakistani leadership visit to Beijing in the near future are part of the same intensification.”

In Yuan’s reading, the underlying driver of the intensification is that Xi’s strategic objective of launching a Taiwan war has hardened. Yuan argued that Xi was recently forced to decapitate the People’s Armed Police command structure due to political loyalty concerns, and that until the leadership of that structure is rebuilt, Xi cannot operationally launch a Taiwan war. According to “sources of conscience inside the CCP” that Yuan said he has access to, Xi continues to treat the launch of a Taiwan war as one of the most central objectives of his personal political project.

“He is attempting to launch a Taiwan war and conquer Taiwan as his Communist emperor dream of matching Mao Zedong,” Yuan said. “Under the current circumstances, this concentrated diplomatic activity can only mean that Xi continues to treat launching a Taiwan war as his most important national strategy, and as the primary driver of the rapid militarization of the Chinese state.”

The US-Iran negotiations: what can’t be won on the battlefield cannot be won at the table

On the Iran question, Trump said the United States has paused the resumption of military strikes against the Iranian theocracy at the request of allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and that the allies believe Iran will offer “a very acceptable nuclear deal.” Analysts have suggested the U.S.-Iran military confrontation could resume at any time.

Yuan was skeptical that Trump’s recent statements should be taken at face value. “Trump has said too much,” Yuan said. “He’s said he would destroy Iran’s theocratic government and achieve total victory within two weeks to a month. He’s said he would destroy Persian civilization and bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. So at this point, what Trump says is no longer particularly important.”

The real test for the Iran war, Yuan argued, is the basic rule he had cited in previous interviews: what cannot be won on the battlefield cannot be won at the negotiating table. The Iran war has only two possible final outcomes. One is that the United States, in coordination with Israel and its Middle Eastern strategic partners, returns to deliver a decisive military blow to the Iranian theocracy. Only then is a final agreement signed on U.S. terms possible. If the negotiations are dragged out without such a strike, any final agreement will necessarily be the product of mutual compromise and will be deeply humiliating to the United States. Without further destructive military action against the theocracy, Yuan argued, what Trump has called “a great deal” (that is, a deal good for the United States) is not possible.

Yuan calls for a new political will for the June 4 anniversary

The 37th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre is approaching. Asked what the anniversary should now mean, Yuan said the time has come for a new political will. “Thirty-seven years have passed since June 4. The CCP regime still rules China. I believe we must now inject a new political will into commemorating June 4. That political will is that the Chinese people must follow the example of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and especially Romania, and launch a national resistance and popular uprising. The Chinese people must reclaim the iron will of the Xinhai Revolution: to resist autocracy and to seek freedom. In the course of a new popular uprising, the CCP regime must be completely destroyed.”

On May 24, Yuan said, he and several colleagues launched the 2026 June 4 memorial campaign on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of Taiwan’s Presidential Office. The theme of the campaign, in Yuan’s framing, is the mourning of the hundreds of millions of victims of Chinese Communism. The campaign’s underlying argument, Yuan said, is that the CCP is the most ruthless enemy of the Chinese people. Seventy-plus years of CCP rule have destroyed the spiritual homeland, cultural inheritance, and ancestral memory of the Chinese, and have imposed the most brutal totalitarian rule in ten thousand years of regional history on every nationality of East Asia, including the Han. The victims of CCP rule have yet to receive any justice.

Yuan also addressed the CCP’s recent anti-Japan propaganda campaign. The propaganda, he argued, is designed to lock both Chinese sentiment and Japan’s national position inside the post-World War II international order. That order, Yuan said, no longer exists. Three transformations in Asia have already supplanted it. First, the emergence on the East Asian mainland of the CCP, a totalitarian regime that has under Xi’s leadership become a primary source of twenty-first-century war and human catastrophe. Second, Japan’s eighty-plus-year transformation into a free, democratic country and an exemplar of contemporary civilization. Third, Taiwan’s transformation, beginning with its first direct presidential election in 1996, into an independent democratic state that has resolved the question of its national status.

The three transformations, Yuan said, demonstrate that the post-WWII international order in Asia has effectively been replaced. The reason June 4 memorials can be held openly in Taiwan, and the reason Yuan said he will travel to Japan to participate in Japan-based June 4 memorials, is that Taiwan and Japan are now free societies. The Chinese people, Yuan concluded, must recognize that their most ruthless enemy is not Japan and not Taiwan, but the CCP itself. Taiwan and Japan, in Yuan’s framing, are friends of the Chinese people.

By Li Jingru, Vision Times