Matt Bevan

It's called Zugzwang.

It's basically a situation where one player forces the other into making a move that puts them in a worse position than before.

In chess you can't skip a turn so invariably there will come a time when you need to make a move that weakens your game.

Xi Jinping has spent his entire presidency preparing for this, trying to engineer a zugzwang so that the US can't do anything to attack China without weakening its own position.

Slowly but surely, over the years, Xi has been moving his pieces into the perfect position, almost impossible to breach.

He's built his own supply chains and an economy that is large, powerful and so integrated with the rest of the world that if the US were to hit China with sanctions, it would be enormously costly to everyone.

He's inherited a large nuclear weapons program and military, both of which he's invested in to make China even more difficult to challenge.

He's established relationships with maritime ports in key locations that could be used as military bases if the need arose.

He's used Chinese funds to build diplomatic alliances all over the world, from Hungary to Russia to Venezuela to Iran to Solomon Islands.

The question is, though, why?

The US has been at Zugzwang for years.

They were probably at Zugzwang before Xi Jinping even became the president.

Now, if not for this very long list of things I've spent the last few minutes ticking through, most countries around the world would be absolutely thrilled to trade and cooperate with China.

It's a manufacturing powerhouse, it's invested incredible amounts in developing new technology, and it's also very cheap.

So why does China insist on doing all those things and jeopardizing potentially very lucrative trade deals?

Well, Chinese state media told us the answer to that question explicitly during the summit with Donald Trump.

Xi Jinping wants Taiwan.

China considers Taiwan its territory and any military effort to retake the island is a legitimate act of reunification.

Bringing Taiwan under Beijing's control has been an obsession of Xi Jinping for years.

As the wheels of history roll forward towards national reunification and the revival of the nation, the complete reunification of the motherland must be achieved and definitely can be achieved.