Why Invade Taiwan When You Could Capture Siberia?

The Saber Rattles Again

Right on schedule, Beijing is rattling the saber again.

This week, China launched “Justice Mission 2025”—its largest Taiwan-focused military exercises to date. The People’s Liberation Army deployed 130 warplanes and 22 ships, fired rockets into waters near the island, simulated blockades of key ports, and rehearsed what military planners call “anti-access and area denial”—the fancy term for keeping American and Japanese forces out while China does whatever it wants. Taiwan scrambled jets, rerouted hundreds of flights, and issued the usual condemnations. Beijing called it “a stern warning” against separatism. Analysts furrowed their brows and declared that tensions are “higher than at any point in recent years.”

We’ve seen this movie before. We’ll see it again. And I have a simple question that nobody in Washington or Beijing seems willing to ask:

Why choose Taiwan at all—when Siberia lies vast, underpopulated, and exposed?

The Spreadsheet Case for Siberia

The world’s strategic imagination has become oddly narrow. Every crisis simulation, every war game, every breathless headline orbits the same question: When will China invade Taiwan? The assumption is so deeply ingrained that alternatives are treated as unserious. Yet if one strips geopolitics of habit and sentiment and looks coldly at land, resources, risk, and reaction, a heretical question emerges.

From a purely material perspective, Siberia is the greater prize. It contains enormous reserves of oil, gas, rare earths, timber, fresh water, and strategic depth. Its population is thin, its infrastructure sparse, its development uneven. Historically, empires expand not toward fortified islands defended by powerful coalitions, but into frontier spaces where control can be established incrementally. By that logic, Siberia looks less like a fantasy and more like a textbook case.

Taiwan, by contrast, is a nightmare target. An island fortress with mountainous terrain, limited landing zones, and a population that expects invasion. Any attempt to seize it would require the most complex amphibious operation since World War II—under constant surveillance, global media scrutiny, and near certainty of U.S. and allied involvement. Even a “successful” invasion would trigger massive sanctions, capital flight, technological isolation, and a long-term insurgency on a densely populated island with no strategic depth.

The economic calculus alone should give Beijing pause. China depends on imported food—especially soybeans from Brazil. Its high-tech industries, the crown jewels Xi Jinping lavishes party resources upon, would face immediate embargo. The semiconductor fabs China covets would be destroyed or rendered useless in any conflict. A shrinking fighting-age population—thanks to decades of family planning policy—means every casualty counts double. The political costs of a failed reunification attempt could be existential for the Communist Party itself.

Siberia offers the opposite profile. A land border. Fewer cameras. No amphibious gamble. No immediate threat to U.S. alliance credibility. No semiconductor choke point that instantly unites capitals from Tokyo to Berlin.

If two authoritarian great powers, one of which is a perennial world problem child, clashed over remote territory, would anyone seriously care? That’s a huge stretch.

The Historical Irony

But here’s the uncomfortable historical irony: China’s claim to Siberia is actually stronger than its claim to Taiwan.

Beijing calls Taiwan “a sacred and inseparable part” of Chinese territory. The history says otherwise. The Qing dynasty ruled Taiwan for about 200 years, then ceded it to Japan in 1895 after losing a war. Japan held it for 50 years. The Republic of China fled there in 1949 after losing to Mao. The People’s Republic of China has never governed Taiwan for a single day. Not one.

Now consider the Russian Far East. Russia seized the territories north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri from the Qing in the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860)—imposed at gunpoint while China was reeling from the Opium Wars. That’s Vladivostok. The entire Maritime Province. Roughly 350,000 square miles that China controlled for centuries under the Qing, stripped away by unequal treaties that Beijing officially considers illegitimate. Mao reportedly raised the issue with Khrushchev. Chinese maps published into the 1960s showed those lands in irredentist shading.

If historical grievance were the metric, Siberia would come first. Taiwan’s own president, Lai Ching-te, has made this point: if China cares so much about “territorial integrity,” why doesn’t it ask for its land back from Russia?

The Nuclear Complication

Of course, Siberia comes with its own deterrent: nuclear weapons. Russia may be weakened and isolated, but it remains a nuclear-armed state. Nuclear weapons have a way of turning “easy” land grabs into existential gambles, regardless of how empty the map looks.

But nuclear war makes no sense—as long as China isn’t at the gates of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. The nuclear codes are in Moscow. Siberia can’t defend itself that way. And would Moscow really trade its western cities for Vladivostok?

Siberia Already Wants Out

Siberians aren’t thrilled with Moscow either. Western Siberia provides most of Russia’s oil and gas, but the taxes go to the Kremlin while the locals freeze. Yakutia, Russia’s largest republic, has seen thousands of its young men die in Ukraine—dozens of times the casualty rate of soldiers from Moscow—while their homeland gets plundered for diamonds and gold.

There’s a Siberian battalion fighting in Ukraine right now, dreaming of independence.

If Russia’s grip loosens, China might not need to fire a shot. Think Afghanistan: one day the government controls the territory, the next day it doesn’t. Beijing just walks in by secret agreement with the locals. Who’s going to stop them?

Russia Weakens

Meanwhile, Russia grows weaker by the month. The sanctions regime shows no signs of lifting. The military is grinding itself down in Ukraine. The economy contracts. The demographic picture is catastrophic. Eastern Russia depopulates while China’s northeastern provinces press against the border.

And the Kremlin knows it. A leaked FSB document obtained by the New York Times last year refers to China as “the enemy” and warns that Beijing is searching for traces of “ancient Chinese peoples” in the Russian Far East—laying ideological groundwork for territorial claims. Putin’s own spies see what’s coming.

And here’s the thing about China: they’re patient. The Chinese Communist Party thinks in decades, not election cycles. They don’t need to invade Siberia now. They can wait.

Russia is doing the work for them. Every tank lost in Ukraine is a tank not defending the Far East. Every young Russian killed or fled is one fewer to populate those empty eastern provinces. Every year of sanctions degrades the industrial base that might otherwise resist Chinese economic dominance. Putin has made Russia a junior partner to Beijing, dependent on Chinese markets, Chinese technology, Chinese goodwill. The leverage shifts a little more each month.

Hitler and Stalin were friends too—until they weren’t. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact lasted exactly as long as it was useful. “No limits” partnerships between authoritarian powers have a way of finding their limits. But Stalin had the Allies waiting in the wings. Putin has no one. Russia’s only friend is China. If that friendship sours, nobody is coming to Moscow’s defense.

And here’s the thing the foreign policy establishment won’t say out loud: Russia is already a pariah, already under sanctions from most of the world. If China decided to absorb its “friend,” the West might issue stern condemnations—and privately send Beijing a Christmas cake.

The most valuable land for China’s future isn’t to its east. It’s to its north.

The only reason Beijing isn’t thinking this way is either: (1) lack of imagination, or (2) they already are.