Beijing is a busy place these days. Just as Sir Keir Starmer left, Uruguay’s president, Yamandu Orsi, and Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s security council, arrived. Today, it welcomes more guests: a delegation of Kuomintang (KMT) politicians, together with dozens of Taiwanese academics.

It’s ostensibly an academic exchange to discuss things like tourism and sustainability. In reality, the trip reopens the party-to-party channels that have been dormant for ten years.

History buffs will remember the KMT as the erstwhile rulers of China, whose retreat from the Chinese Communist Party ended in Taiwan, fracturing the empire. But history has a funny way of unfolding. The party of Chiang Kai-shek is now the more pro-engagement-with-Beijing voice in Taiwanese politics. Out of power since 2016, its new leader, the fiery Cheng Li-wun, has grand plans. She is reaching out to Beijing again and may herself meet Xi Jinping in the next few months.

When Taiwan is discussed in the West, it’s almost always as a strategic chess piece in the game between great powers, with little attention given to its domestic politics. But these politics matter. That’s particularly clear right now: since the 2024 election, its main parties have been engaged in a parliamentary tussle with existential fervour.

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While they battle, China watches on in anticipation. So as the KMT delegation arrives in Beijing, their colleagues in Taipei continue to hold up a number of government initiatives, in particular a $40 billion defence package. They, along with the upstart Taiwan People’s Party, hold a majority in the legislative Yuan, foiling the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidency.

The divided government has made for a chaotic back and forth, resembling Britain’s Brexit forever wars. The executive has refused to sign off on a flagship bill that was passed by the legislature, which has started impeachment proceedings in retaliation. Into this deadlock will soon go the new trade deal negotiated with the US, which would, among other things, cut American tariffs on Taiwan from 20 per cent to 15 per cent — but it needs to be passed first.

The DPP has hardly been blameless. Last year it pushed a mass recall of KMT legislators in an attempt to rejig the parliamentary maths. Voters were incensed that they were being asked to vote again on the same people they’d voted in the year before. Remarkably they returned every single KMT representative, which the party took to mean they had a “mandate to go all in”, says Brian Hioe, editor of Taiwan’s New Bloom magazine. Both sides are now entrenched.

The island’s democracy is no stranger to divided government, with defence spending held hostage in the late 2000s under a previous DPP executive and KMT legislature. But the difference is that the world is a more perilous place today. The size of China’s economy has quadrupled since then, as has its military spending.

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Of course, taking over Taiwan would still be difficult, requiring a level of smooth collaboration between land, sea and air that the People’s Liberation Army is unlikely to be capable of yet. Xi’s military purges probably don’t help battle readiness, while new weapons change the military calculus all the time. And yet, compared with 20 years ago, China is clearly better prepared for battle today.

At the same time, the US seems more ambivalent about Taiwan than ever. “We’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” Donald Trump told Bloomberg in 2024. Taipei is watching events in Venezuela and over Greenland as keenly as anyone, knowing that it wouldn’t be the first ally that Trump has betrayed. How much can it really rely on America?

These new dynamics raise the stakes for Taiwan’s parliamentary deadlock, which seems indulgent at best. It’s enough to irritate allies. “At some point like-minded democratic partners will ask why they are filling in the gap when Taiwan’s political class cannot even get their act together,” an unnamed European official said to Nikkei Asia recently. It’s an opinion shared by some in Washington, where isolationists hardly need an excuse to pull back.

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Cheng Li-wun believes the best way to keep the peace is by cooling the rhetoric. She’s watering down the DPP’s defence package not out of disloyalty to Taiwan (or so she says) but because she thinks an expensive military build-up can be avoided by just returning to the “1992 consensus”, a diplomatic fudge where Taipei and Beijing both recognise that there is “one China”, without spelling out which is the real China.

But she is being dangerously over-optimistic, perhaps even naive. It’s true that provocative rhetoric risks goading Xi into military action — he is certain to invade if he ever thinks that all non-military means have been exhausted. But there is no reason for Taiwan to slow its military build-up, even if its relationship with China improves.

Xi has shown himself to be a ruthless leader with grand ambitions. Clearly, if the Chinese military ever gained a clear superiority over Taiwan’s, it would strike, 1992 consensus or not. Stopping the military build-up now is gambling with Taiwan’s future.

But there’s no sign of Cheng’s mind changing any time soon, nor of the parliamentary perma-wars ending at home. I’m reminded of the Chinese parable of the clam and the snipe. As the bird tries to eat the clam, the clam shuts its shell and traps the snipe’s beak. While the two are immobile, stuck in their existential struggle, a fisherman comes by and captures both. If Taiwan’s political parties don’t snap out of it, it will be China that reaps the rewards.