The US said China didn’t plan to invade Taiwan in 2027, backpedalling on a previous intelligence assessment ahead of Donald Trump’s planned summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.
In a new annual intelligence report, the US said: “China, despite its threat to use force to compel unification if necessary and to counter what it sees as a US attempt to use Taiwan to undermine China’s rise, prefers to achieve unification without the use of force, if possible.”
“Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027, nor do they have a fixed timeline for achieving unification”, the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community report by the Director of National Intelligence read.
The report, however, reiterated a previous assessment that the People’s Liberation Army was making “steady but uneven” progress on capabilities it could use to capture the democratically governed island.
China claims sovereignty over the island and seeks to “reunite” it with the mainland by force if necessary.
Taiwan rejects China’s sovereignty claims and maintains that only the island's people can decide its future.
The intelligence assessment comes at a time when the US is preparing for a summit between Mr Trump and his Chinese counterpart.
It is not yet clear if the summit will go ahead as planned given Mr Trump is prosecuting a US-Israeli war against Iran, embroiling the Middle East into a major conflict.
On Monday, Mr Trump asked to delay his visit to China by about a month because of the war. The American president confirmed the White House had “requested that we delay it a month or so”.
The latest assessment walks back some of the 2023 intelligence report quoting the Chinese leader as telling his military to “be ready by 2027" to invade Taiwan.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth told allies in the Indo-Pacific last year that Washington would bolster its defences overseas as China’s invasion of Taiwan appeared “imminent”.
He said China was “actively training” every day to capture Taiwan and the PLA was “rehearsing for the real deal”.
"We are not going to sugarcoat it – the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent,” he said at the Shangri-La dialogue.
Mr Trump previously played down the risk of Chinese military action while he remained in office.
As recently as late last year, the Pentagon said it believed China was preparing to be able to win a fight for Taiwan by 2027 and was refining options to take the island by “brute force” if needed.
Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait since has strengthened that impression, according to experts monitoring a sudden dip in military flights around the island.
The weeklong dip in flights could be driven by a shift to the next phase in China’s military training and modernisation, according to K Tristan Tang, Taipei-based non-resident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research.
Mr Xi’s military appears to be exploring a new model for joint training between its air force and navy and possibly its ground forces.
Such exploratory activity would likely be conducted away from Taiwan to prevent other countries from monitoring it and that explained why fewer Chinese planes were in the area, Mr Tang said.
In response to the new US intelligence assessment, Taiwan's de facto embassy in Washington said Taipei would continue to monitor China's activities and "remain vigilant at all times”.
"China has never abandoned the use of force against Taiwan and its continued military intimidation and gray-zone operations pose serious threats not only to Taiwan but also to regional peace and stability," it said in a statement.
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