In 1950, Mao Zedong's troops were poised to invade Taiwan.
It was the last territory under the control of Chiang Kai-shek, a nationalist leader against whom the communists had fought in the Chinese civil war.
So North Korea, supported by Stalin, decided to invade South Korea.
Mao had to move his troops from Taiwan to the Sino-Korean border.
Chinese national reunification was aborted.
Taiwan was consolidated as the great American bastion of the Cold War from which they wanted to reconquer China from the hands of communism.
The island became the most enduring and important point of tension between Beijing and Washington.
Apart from these two great powers, the citizens of Taiwan, in the 1990s, decided to reject the communist and pro-American authoritarianism that had dominated the island for decades, and found their own democracy.
Taiwan was already then an example of modernization imitated both by the leaders of the Communist Party and by the young Chinese.
The economy and society of mainland China and Taiwan were becoming more and more alike.
On both sides of the strait people dressed the same or similar companies were founded.
But this convergence remained unfinished on the political plane: neither Taiwan became communist, nor democratic mainland China.
The Taiwanese began to understand their identity from this political difference and not from a common national-cultural history.
When Nancy Pelosi recently visited Taiwan, she also framed her visit within this tension between democracy and authoritarianism.
But, as realist Elbridge Colby has argued, US support for Taiwan is fundamentally aimed at containing Chinese hegemony.
In the American mentality, a kind of domino 2.0 theory dominates: if Beijing controls Taiwan, it will be able to effectively extend its hegemony in East Asia and then do so throughout the globe.
To contain China, the US wants to involve Asian middle powers in the Taiwan conflict, arguing that this is essential for the stability of the Indo-Pacific.
The Japanese are supportive: ex-colonizers of Taiwan, for them the island has always been a strategic scenario.
Instead,
China interprets Pelosi's visit as a further step (and an important step) in a tacit US support for a process of independence in Taiwan.
If Beijing comes to believe that this support is going to increase and other countries are going to back Taipei, gradually leaving behind a policy of maintaining the
status quo
, you might see your best option as blockading or invading Taiwan before the US and Taipei beef up the island's defenses.
Many analysts, including Americans, believe that, today, China would win this war.
The US must think carefully about what signals it wants to send to China.
Pelosi's visit has been a purely symbolic move that has not been accompanied by commitments or military material to Taiwan in case the situation escalates.
China's response has not been symbolic.
It has temporarily surrounded Taiwan through military exercises with live fire, in what some analysts consider training for a possible future blockade of the island.
China has also broken its cooperation with the US on climate matters, one of the few areas where both powers could collaborate.
For the Communist Party of China, reunification with Taiwan is one of the inalienable goals that it has promised since the end of the Chinese civil war.
The initial legitimacy of the Communist Party was built on its ability to unify the country after decades of division under foreign warlords and colonizers.
This is why many Chinese forgive Mao's crimes: despite his millions of deaths, he founded a united and sovereign regime.
The Communist Party has been, above all, a nationalist party rather than a socialist party.
Its legitimacy has as its great pillar the maintenance of Chinese territorial unity.
The last missing piece is Taiwan.
He has never given up on it, but he put the reunification process on hold for decades by mutual agreement with the United States.
Now both are accused of breaking the
status quo.
In a few months, General Secretary Xi Jinping has a Party Congress where he wants to be re-elected as leader.
Pelosi's visit has come at a critical political time.
Xi is now meeting with Party seniors on the beaches of Beidaihe, where they come every summer for informal discussions.
In addition to recovering an economy damaged by the "covid zero" policy, Xi will have to demonstrate, before the Party and public opinion, that he is the indicated leader to manage the reunification with Taiwan and the rivalry with the United States.
The Party is much more at stake than Washington if the island definitively slips out of its hands.
Javier Borràs Arumí
is an international relations analyst and author of a book on Red and Gray China (Alalphabet).
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