Singapore: To the outside world, General Zhang Youxia seemed relatively secure at the top of China’s military machine. As secure as anyone can be under President Xi Jinping.
Since 2023, Xi’s anti-corruption drive has taken a Stalinist turn, with friend and foe alike purged in a stunning hollowing out of the elite ranks of the People’s Liberation Army.
Zhang, vice-chair of the powerful Central Military Commission and second-in-command of the army to Xi, had survived earlier purges that cut down the top generals around him. He was thought by some to be a close ally of Xi. They had grown up together as “princeling” sons of China’s communist revolutionary elite.
But most importantly, he was a rare breed of Chinese general with actual combat experience.
The news of Zhang’s sudden detention on Saturday, alongside another top general, Liu Zhenli, for “grave violations of discipline and the law”, shocked China experts. Graft has been a major problem in the PLA for decades, but this move confirmed nobody was safe from Xi’s campaign to root out corruption and disloyalty.
It has also left a gaping hole in China’s peak military decision-making body, reigniting fresh debate about the preparedness of the PLA to carry out Xi’s ultimate goal of taking control of Taiwan.
China regards the island democracy of 23 million people as its own territory, but the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it.
When Beijing might make this move and what form it could take – such as a full-scale military invasion, or a naval blockade designed to cut the island off from its outside support and resources – is the subject of extensive debate among China watchers, defence experts and government officials in the US and elsewhere.
In recent years, one date in particular – 2027 – has become so embedded in Western policy circles and media commentary that it has, at times, warped into a theoretical deadline for when Xi could fulfil his threat to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland.
Today, many China experts stress that 2027 shouldn’t be seen as a deadline for invasion, but rather a marker for assessing Beijing’s military capability to execute one.
With the PLA in disarray, some analysts argue that Beijing’s threat to Taiwan has dissipated in the short term, but could prove deadlier in the long run as Xi appoints new loyalist generals. Others theorise that the shifting geopolitics under US President Donald Trump means nothing can be ruled out.
Beijing has not publicly articulated a timeline for controlling Taiwan.
So where did this 2027 fixation come from, and is it still a useful benchmark for understanding Beijing’s calculus on Taiwan?
US intelligence and the Davidson window
The 2027 timeframe took root in Washington after US Admiral Phil Davidson, then leading the US Indo-Pacific Command, told a 2021 congressional hearing he was concerned Beijing was “accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States”.
“Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions… And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years,” he testified.
The timeline became known as the “Davidson window”.
In February 2023, then-CIA director William Burns reaffirmed the significance of the target to Taiwan’s strategic thinking. Speaking at an event at Georgetown University, he said US authorities knew “as a matter of intelligence” that Xi had ordered the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, but that this was not a deadline.
“But that doesn’t mean he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well,” Burns said, repeating this view during a TV interview with US broadcaster CBS weeks later.
He added that while the US must “take very seriously Xi’s ambitions” to control Taiwan, it did not mean that a military conflict was inevitable.
Military modernisation and the 2027 milestone
The exact nature of the US intelligence referred to by Burns is not clear. But analysts point to China’s massive and rapid military build-up, in line with modernisation goals that Xi has set for the army.
In October 2020, a meeting of the party’s top governing body signed off on a new 2027 milestone for modernising the military, which aligns with the PLA’s 100th anniversary.
The US defence sector interpreted this move as Beijing setting a new interim target for accelerating its already publicised goals of completing “military modernisation by 2035” and possessing a “world-class military by mid-century” in 2049.
If the 2027 efforts were realised, this “could give the PLA capabilities to be a more credible military tool for the CCP’s Taiwan unification efforts”, a US Department of Defence report said in 2023.
The CCP leadership has not explicitly tied these modernisation goals to its Taiwan agenda. But a link has been drawn and “taken on a life of its own” due to the unification of Taiwan being one of the party’s top goals, says former Pentagon official Drew Thompson.
“If you look at PLA writings from the Academy of Military Science, in particular, Taiwan has always been central to modernisation strategy and force development efforts,” says Thompson, now a US-China relations academic at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
“Because of that, the 2027 date has taken on a life of its own because of Xi Jinping’s emphasis on centennial goals and their connection to the ‘China dream’ of the great rejuvenation of China to be achieved in 2049”.
It’s not a deadline, he adds.
Dr Zack Cooper, an expert in US-China strategy in Asia at the American Enterprise Institute, says having a date became a useful tool for the defence sector to drive a funding push at a time when the US military was struggling to get resources for its Indo-Pacific endeavours.
“Members of Congress took it much more seriously, even though many of us have been warning that we were heading into a much more difficult period for several years. But 2027 grabbed politicians in a way that nothing else had,” Cooper says.
Xi ramps up military firepower, but purges top generals
In 2023, on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco, Xi told then-US president Joe Biden that Beijing was determined to unify Taiwan with the mainland, through peaceful means as the first preference, according to a senior US official who briefed reporters on the meeting.
Xi, according to the US briefing, also dismissed speculation about a deadline.
“President Xi basically said, look, I hear all these reports in the United States how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035 … there are no such plans, no one has talked to me about this,” the US official said, summarising the conversation.
Whatever Beijing’s calculus is, Chinese officials are not going to announce it to the world in advance, least of all give a deadline to their foremost rival.
But Xi has signalled that he wants the “Taiwan question” resolved on his watch and is widely expected to seek an unprecedented fourth term in 2027. Since becoming leader in 2012, he has repeatedly described it as something that “cannot be passed on from generation to generation”.
China has not renounced using force to realise this aim.
Xi has also presided over a massive military build-up that includes more than doubling its nuclear warhead stockpile to 600 warheads since 2019, with US defence estimates putting it on track to reach 1000 warheads by 2030.
The PLA Navy is now the world’s largest maritime force with 234 warships to the US Navy’s 219, though it still trails the US in some key capability metrics.
At a massive military parade in September, where Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un were key guests, Beijing showcased a range of new advanced weapons, drone systems, high-energy laser weapons, autonomous sea vehicles, and anti-ship missiles.
But unlike US forces, China’s army lacks combat experience and has not fought a war since 1979, when it invaded Vietnam and suffered heavy losses.
China has also ramped up its war games in the waters around Taiwan, in intimidatory shows of force. In December, the PLA conducted its largest military drills to date, test-firing rockets, simulating strikes on targets, and deploying new amphibious assault ships in a rehearsal of a naval blockade of the island.
The Pentagon’s latest report assessing China’s capabilities, also released in December, restated the centrality of the 2027 milestone in US thinking, noting “China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027”.
At the same time, Xi’s gutting of the top military ranks has fuelled speculation that he is not satisfied with the PLA’s progress on its Taiwan strategy. But Chinese elite politics is notoriously opaque and these remain just theories.
K. Tristan Tang, an analyst with the Pacific Forum think tank, believes Zhang was purged because his war preparations openly conflicted with Xi’s 2027 benchmark, while he “clearly placed this goal closer to 2035”.
Together with Liu, “their presence instead posed a challenge to Xi’s authority”, he concluded in a report this week analysing months of official party statements. Regardless of their removal, the probability of achieving the 2027 Taiwan invasion capability remains extremely low, he says.
With Zhang and Liu’s ouster, Xi has purged all but one of the six generals he handpicked for the Central Military Commission in 2022. Just two remain: Xi himself as chair and Zhang Shengmin (no relation to Zhang Youxia), who has overseen the anti-corruption purges in the military.
It follows the expulsion of two former defence ministers from the party in 2024, as well as the removal of dozens of other high-ranking officers in recent years, on a scale unmatched since the Mao Zedong era.
“This means China’s military cannot fight, as it has a broken chain of command and relative absence of war-fighting-related experience and expertise at the top level,” says Wen-Ti Sung, fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, based in Taiwan.
Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, says this weakness may prove short-lived.
“In the long term, a less corrupt, more loyal, and more capable military could more credibly coerce Taipei into submission and deter Washington from intervening,” he says.
As for Taiwan, the 2027 timeframe has also become embedded in the strategic psyche in Taipei.
In its annual military drills last year, Taiwanese troops simulated scenarios defending against a 2027 Chinese invasion, and President Lai Ching-te cited this timeline when he announced a budget bill to ramp up defence spending.
“We won’t let the downfall of any one person make us lower our guard or slacken the level of war preparedness we should maintain,” said Taiwan Defence Minister Wellington Koo this week.
Is 2027 still a useful benchmark?
While the Chinese leadership’s thinking is a black box, whether the US will intervene to defend the island, potentially expanding a regional conflict into a wider war, is almost certainly the priority factor for Beijing.
In December, the White House approved a $US11.1 billion ($15.8 billion) arms package to Taiwan, its largest ever.
Trump has largely adhered to the deterrence policy of strategic ambiguity, that is, being deliberately vague about how Washington may respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
“It’s a source of pride for him. He considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing. But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that,” Trump told The New York Times earlier this month.
But Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy has also raised anxiety among Taiwan supporters in Washington and elsewhere that he could trade away US backing in a bid to strike a grand bargain with Xi. The pair did not discuss Taiwan when they met on the sidelines of APEC in South Korea in October, but many observers are anticipating it will be a key agenda item when Trump makes a state visit to Beijing in April.
Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Centre, a US think tank, says the Chinese view on Taiwan changed significantly in 2025 due to the perception that Trump had little interest in defending it militarily. She argues a move by Beijing could happen sooner rather than later.
“The Chinese policy community is increasingly convinced that an effort to assert control of Taiwan will happen, and it could even be imminent if Taiwan does something to provoke Beijing,” Sun writes in Foreign Affairs magazine this month.
She does not believe the removal of the top leaders will affect the operational capability of the PLA.
However, some analysts say the fixation on 2027 has distracted from other important considerations.
“Xi Jinping’s purges are undermining the PLA operationally while elections in Taiwan and the United States loom. For both reasons, Beijing would be wise to wait out the next two years,” says Cooper.
“As a result, I would expect 2028 and 2029 to be much more risky periods for cross-Strait dynamics.”
Other factors include the sheer difficulty of launching an invasion due to Taiwan’s mountainous geography and the need for mass transit of Chinese forces across the 180-kilometre-wide Taiwan Strait. Defence analysts routinely describe an invasion as likely to be one of the largest, most complex military operations in history.
The cost of miscalculation for Xi, especially at a time when China’s domestic economy is in the doldrums, is high.
“A military conflict over Taiwan would risk massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions, all of which could turn his dream into a nightmare and undermine his political authority,” says China expert Bonnie Glaser in a report for the German Marshall Fund think tank.
Meanwhile, China will continue a near-daily campaign of grey-zone harassment – from cyberattacks to sending fighter jets and coast guard ships to patrol around Taiwan – designed to exhaust resources and resolve.
As Glaser put it recently: “The Chinese believe that time is on their side to achieve reunification without sacrificing blood and treasure.”
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