The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the End of Strategic Ambiguity

The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the End of Strategic Ambiguity

For more than seventy years, we have pretended the Taiwan question can be managed indefinitely - through ambiguity, arms sales, diplomatic wordplay, and the quiet assumption that history will simply pause. That assumption is false. The Wound That Never Closed is an attempt to say plainly what is no longer safe to say politely. The story does not begin in 1949, with Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat, nor with contemporary debates about democracy versus authoritarianism. It begins in 1895, with a gunshot in Shimonoseki and the forced severing of Taiwan from China under imperial pressure. Everything that followed, the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Cold War, American intervention, and the long pretense of permanence, flows from that original rupture. This book examines the Taiwan Strait without sentimentality, walking through the legal foundations governing Taiwan’s status, the military realities shaping American and Chinese decision-making, the economic and demographic forces pulling the island toward resolution, and the myths of unsinkable aircraft carriers, silicon shields, and guaranteed rescue that distort public understanding. It confronts the uncomfortable parallels with Hong Kong, not to score points, but to reveal what happens when moral confidence supplants strategic leverage. This is not a defense of Beijing, nor a brief for authoritarianism. It is a refusal to tell comforting lies . Taiwan deserves honesty about its options. Western audiences deserve clarity about the limits of their power. And policymakers deserve arguments grounded in structure rather than slogans. The wound opened in 1895 never healed . The only remaining question is how it closes, through negotiation and foresight, or through catastrophe. This book exists because that choice is approaching faster than most are willing to admit.