China’s Taiwan Affairs Office used a routine press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday to present reunification with the mainland as the solution to Taiwan’s energy vulnerability, offering to guarantee stable electricity and resource supplies to the island if Taipei agreed to come under Beijing’s political control — a proposal delivered as Taiwan was actively diversifying away from Middle East gas suppliers and the US Congress was advancing legislation explicitly designed to insulate Taiwan from the kind of energy leverage China was attempting to exercise.
Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Chen Binhua told reporters that “peaceful reunification” would bring “better protection of Taiwan’s energy and resource security with a strong motherland as its backing.” He said: “We are willing to provide Taiwan compatriots with stable and reliable energy and resource security, so that they may live better lives,” responding to a question about Taiwan’s LNG supplies during the war in the Middle East.
Chen said the “removal of barriers between the two sides of the strait will ensure the smooth flow of resources,” arguing that the mainland’s power generation surplus was “more than sufficient to meet the electricity needs of Taiwan’s companies” and could “ensure that households across the island are freed from the inconvenience and worries of power shortages and outages.”
The framing presented mainland China not as a geopolitical adversary but as a reliable energy partner held at arm’s length only by Taiwan’s own political decisions.
Taiwan’s government did not issue an immediate response. The island’s official position — maintained consistently by every major political party across the democratic spectrum — is that questions of sovereignty and political status are for the Taiwanese people to determine, and that Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework offers no genuine autonomy based on the model’s implementation in Hong Kong.
In Taipei, President Lai Ching-te was addressing a Democratic Progressive Party meeting as Beijing made its announcement, and reiterated that Taiwan had adopted a “diversified and multi-source strategic approach to energy imports” and that supplies through April were already secured. “From June more US gas will be imported,” he said, according to a party statement.
The energy mathematics behind the Chinese offer illustrate both its surface logic and its structural limitations. Taiwan sources approximately 30 percent of its LNG from the Middle East, primarily from Qatar, and thermal generation fueled by LNG accounts for roughly half of the island’s total electricity supply. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on February 28 has created immediate planning pressure on Taiwan’s state energy utility, CPC Corporation. Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed it had secured 20 of the 22 LNG shipments needed to cover March and April demand and was working to arrange the remaining two. Minister Kung Ming-hsin described suggestions that supply might be inadequate as “impossible.” Taiwan has accelerated advance deliveries, sourced spot purchases from alternative suppliers, and worked with the United States to bring forward contracted LNG shipments.
Read Also: Taiwan’s Economic Boom Can Fund Military Growth – President
The US congressional response to Taiwan’s energy vulnerability has moved in exactly the opposite direction from Beijing’s offer. Republican Representative Pat Harrigan introduced the Taiwan Energy Security and Anti-Embargo Act of 2026, which would authorize a joint Taiwan-US energy security center and mandate a National Academy of Sciences report on increasing LNG exports to Taiwan. “Energy is leverage,” Harrigan said. “Beijing knows exactly where Taiwan is weakest — and global events today, from strikes in the Middle East to threats at chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, underscore that energy vulnerability is national security vulnerability.”
The Chinese offer’s internal contradictions were noted by Taiwan policy analysts on the day of its delivery. China itself banned domestic fuel exports last week through at least the end of March, sources told Reuters, an emergency measure to prevent domestic shortages driven by the same Strait of Hormuz crisis that Beijing was offering to protect Taiwan from. AIS ship tracking data shows that Strait of Hormuz transit dropped to near-zero since March 10, including for PRC and Hong Kong-flagged ships, indicating that China itself cannot reliably access its Iranian oil imports through the strait — the same waterway whose closure creates Taiwan’s energy anxiety. Offering to guarantee Taiwan’s energy supply as a by-product of reunification is harder to present credibly when China’s own energy access is impaired by the same conflict.
The energy offer is the latest element of a campaign that Beijing has been running with greater intensity since the Middle East war began. China’s state news agency Xinhua published a detailed analysis last October outlining the economic and social benefits of reunification for Taiwan’s population, including financial assistance and market integration, conditioned on governance by “patriots” — a term widely understood to mean individuals loyal to Beijing’s political framework rather than Taiwan’s democratic institutions. That document was followed in January by intensified messaging from the Taiwan Affairs Office and by a series of social media videos targeted at Taiwanese audiences describing the material advantages of integration with the mainland.
Read Also: US Navy P-8A Transits Taiwan Strait Ahead of Trump China Trip
China has simultaneously been pressing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, reportedly advocating specifically for crude oil and Qatari LNG to be permitted to transit so that Chinese imports can resume. The PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, which oversees military operations involving Taiwan, has reduced the frequency of gray-zone incursion flights around the island in recent weeks. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War have assessed that this reduction likely reflects a reallocation of air force training resources toward joint inter-service exercises rather than any shift in strategic intent.
Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan continues to review three competing versions of the supplemental defense budget at debate since Lai proposed NT$1.25 trillion in new defense spending in November.