Announcing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, is a way the United States could trigger a chain of events that may spell the end of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), says Wang Dan, a prominent Chinese dissident and student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest who is now an American citizen.

“Right now, only the United States has the power to really defeat the CCP,” said Wang, who holds a doctorate in history from Harvard University and taught cross-strait history at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University. Wang was speaking at a democratic movement forum in Sydney on Nov. 12.

“The way it could do it is quite simple: just announce Taiwan–U.S. diplomatic relations.”

Wang believes this would be more crippling to the CCP’s legitimacy than any other form of action.

“The United States could actually say, ‘I recognize two Chinas’—I recognize the People’s Republic of China, but I'll also establish diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, just like with East and West Germany,” he said.

Wang said that if the United States actually announced the rekindling of diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the CCP would be forced to consider how to respond, knowing that any response that involved military action would only bring Beijing trouble.

“Once that happens, China will definitely have to engage in talks, because the U.S. won’t use military force [proactively]—the U.S. will still be willing to maintain friendly relations with China. But China would likely take action, and that could be the final nail in its coffin,” he said.

Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province even though the CCP has never ruled the self-governing island. The United States currently has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, having decided to shift its official recognition from the Republic of China to the CCP in 1979 in the hope that closer ties would promote a more open and liberal mainland China. But this has failed to manifest.

Currently, U.S. support of Taiwan is manifest through the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which authorizes the United States to provide Taiwan with military equipment for its self-defense and to resist any forms of coercion “that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”

“This may be a huge change that no one would have ever anticipated,“ Wang said. ”Don’t think that Taiwan–U.S. diplomatic relations are completely impossible, especially now that we have a U.S. president [Trump] who can do anything—an entirely unpredictable president.”

Wang was one of the main student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protest. He was later sentenced to prison for his role in the movement and went into exile in the United States in 1998.

CCP May Not Win the War

Even if war actually breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, Wang does not believe the CCP can necessarily win.

“Even from a military perspective, I don’t think the communist military has a solid chance of winning,” he said, noting that Taiwan is not that easy to invade. “It has a long coastline, and in terms of intelligence cooperation, Taiwan’s collaboration with Japan and the United States is very strong.”

CCP leader Xi Jinping has instructed China’s military to be ready by 2027 to successfully invade Taiwan, according to CIA Director William Burns.

Wang’s assessment is shared by Lonnie Henley, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute with more than 40 years of experience as an intelligence officer and East Asia expert, who wrote that Beijing could fail to seize Taiwan for several reasons and risk losing power.

“In the wake of a failure to conquer Taiwan, CCP leaders would be scrambling to assert a formula proclaiming strategic victory despite the military outcome, in a desperate effort to save their own skins,” Henley wrote. “It is not at all clear whether they could succeed.”

CCP’s Fall Will Be Overnight

Wang also predicted that the CCP’s fall will be overnight, citing the demise of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union.

“A major characteristic of totalitarian states is that before any change occurs, no one can predict it, because they control all the information,” he said.

“However, once a change begins, it is always sudden and dramatic. The future changes in China will certainly not be gradual. They will be abrupt. Suddenly, a major event may occur, and within a week, China could be turned upside down.”

He pointed to the example of the 1976 “crushing of the Gang of Four,” an event in which a group of old guard political operators in the CCP led by Jiang Qing—CCP founder Mao Zedong’s wife—was brought down. The group had wreaked havoc for years, most notably during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

“In just about a month’s time, China underwent a complete upheaval. ... Less than a month after Mao Zedong’s death, his wife was arrested,” he said. “Such things have happened in China before. Since they have happened once, there’s no reason to believe they can’t happen again.

“If we look at the world, both the Soviet Union and Taiwan changed overnight, so I believe the likelihood of China undergoing a sudden change is over 75 percent, probably as high as 80 percent.”

Frank Fang contributed to this report.