File under ‘P’ for potential game-changers. Or for panda diplomacy. Either way, the China-Taiwan split is really the last vestige of the Cold War, and just as the European front of that war ended through a peaceful integration, there’s no reason (in theory) that China and Taiwan won’t eventually find a mutually acceptable final status arrangement without resorting to the worst-case scenarios of regional conflagration. Especially once the actual ideological differences between the two governments are smoothed over to the point of being undetectable. That still leaves China with a lot of deferred maintenance in terms of ethno-nationalist separatism. But it’s possible Beijing could become less brittle in that regard once the essential question of Taiwan is resolved. Nothing to hold your breath over, obviously, but worth considering.
