Taiwan isn't a threat to China in the military sense. Taiwan is not going to wake up tomorrow and decide to invade China. But Taiwan is a threat indirectly.

Taiwan isn't a threat to China in the military sense. Taiwan is not going to wake up tomorrow and decide to invade China. But Taiwan is a threat indirectly. Chinese people, but with much more political freedom than in the mainland, and with more prosperity - that's a threat to the Communist Party's legitimacy as ruler of China, in the same way that Ukraine is a threat to Putin's rule of Russia. It's somebody just next door, with approximately the same people, who's doing much better and is much more free. It makes the Chinese and Russians start to get ideas that maybe they could have that, too. And Taiwan is more directly a threat, because Xi has explicitly made reunification with Taiwan a measure of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi's mouth made that problem, and now he can't back down without losing face. > Are they willing to kill millions of people just to protect their own pride? In a "face" culture? Yes, they may be.