A single prediction delivered to Congress by a U.S. admiral six years ago has shaped military strategy and spurred billions of dollars in spending in preparation for a potentially catastrophic conflict. The deadline is now just one year away.
Adm. Philip Davidson, speaking to a Senate committee on March 9, 2021, suggested that China’s military advances and ambitions would threaten Taiwan “in the next six years.”
The year 2027 will be looming when President Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in several weeks, given that China has been hoping to extract a concession on U.S. support for Taiwan.
But Davidson’s forecast was based on an American intelligence assessment that has received little outside scrutiny. After making its debut on Capitol Hill, the “Davidson window” quickly became Washington’s accepted truth—a belief that China’s military buildup puts Taiwan at risk of invasion as early as next year.
Xi, meanwhile, hasn’t publicly set any deadlines on Beijing’s longstanding quest to take control of Taiwan, whether peacefully or by force. Nor has China published any remarks from Xi that explicitly link the 2027 date with Taiwan-related military capabilities.
Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in June 2021 that the date was based on a speech given by Xi that challenged the Chinese military to step up its modernization. Milley, in repeating the 2027 date, took pains to emphasize that the deadline was China’s target for military readiness, not a deadline to invade.
The distinction has often been ignored. The “Davidson window” created a sense of urgency from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to Taipei, fueling fears of an impending conflict.
Some analysts and former officials say the U.S. emphasis on a 2027 deadline has stoked an arms race and stirred fear and pessimism in the region.
“Beijing’s goal is to wear down the psychological will of the people of Taiwan,” said Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and a senior adviser on China in the Obama administration. “The more that U.S. officials amped up their warning that doomsday would arrive for Taiwan in 2027, the more it securitized perceptions of Taiwan, scared away foreign capital and talent, and induced pessimism inside Taiwan.”
Since 2021, U.S. spending on Pacific infrastructure has surged as part of a strategy to counter China, said Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for reducing military commitments abroad.
“You don’t build runways in the Pacific islands to compete with Russia, right?” she said.
Between 2012 and 2024, about $260 billion a year in U.S. military spending went toward militarized rivalry with China, according to a new paper by Kavanagh. That amounts to roughly 30% of total military spending over that period.
The Biden and Trump administrations have also approved about $19 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan since 2021.
Xi has stressed that the Chinese Communist Party prefers a peaceful resolution to the Taiwan situation, while declaring that Beijing wouldn’t rule out the possibility of using military force.
China, however, did little to play down the 2027 claim. After a meeting in 2022 with President Joe Biden, Xi grew animated when talking about Taiwan, but U.S. officials were left with the impression there was no Chinese timeline to invade the island. Trump said in August that Xi told him he wouldn’t invade while Trump was in office.
If Beijing hasn’t emphasized its invasion threat in meetings with U.S. leaders, it has done so in military displays. China has amplified the message most vividly by periodically encircling Taiwan with air and seaborne forces and parading its arsenal through Beijing last year.
Most people in Taiwan shrugged off the “Davidson window” at first. The island’s leaders were reluctant to raise concerns of an impending Chinese invasion.
That changed when President Lai Ching-te took office in 2024. In his first year, Lai named China a “foreign adversary” and told the island to be prepared for a potential attack.
In November, Lai sharpened the message, introducing a $40 billion special defense budget and arguing that the funding was necessary in light of Beijing’s goal of achieving the capability for “unification by force” by 2027. Local headlines blared: “President Confirms 2027 Invasion Deadline.”
A few hours later, Lai’s office pivoted and clarified that the president was citing international assessments and U.S. congressional reports rather than predicting a launch date.
Despite the walk-back, 2027 is now a benchmark for the Taiwanese military. Its annual war exercises last summer were explicitly set against a 2027 invasion scenario.
For China, the year 2027 will be the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party’s military wing—what is now the People’s Liberation Army—and will mark the first phase of Xi’s plan to forge a “world-class military” by the middle of the 21st century.
The “PLA centenary goals” pegged to 2027 include overhauls to the military’s organizational structures, hardware upgrades and realistic training aimed at making China’s armed forces more agile and technologically adept.
Beijing hasn’t linked the centenary goals with the party’s request to gain control over Taiwan.
Xi’s broad targets for military modernization are spread across three phases. China wants to “basically complete the modernization of national defense and the armed forces” by 2035, before the final push to “construct a world-class military” that is capable of taking on any adversary, particularly the U.S., by the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2049.
Davidson retired in 2021. He couldn’t be reached for comment on the legacy of his Capitol Hill testimony. In a 2024 interview on the “Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?” podcast, Davidson said he remained concerned about Chinese activities “between now and 2028.”
“They are doing full-blown rehearsals, across multi-domains, and from multi-directions on attack scenarios,” the retired admiral said. The lesson China seemed to have taken from Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he added, “is that a much more comprehensive attack, delivered with much more violence, is actually the solution.”
China has met some bumps on the way to its military development goals. It hasn’t fought a full-scale war since battling Vietnam in 1979, and Xi has purged much of the military’s top leadership over corruption allegations and questions of loyalty.
Such campaigns have involved the removal of lower-ranking military officials connected with the purged leaders and will likely result in a sense of paralysis among those who survive, analysts have said.
Still, China’s military spending has steadily increased by close to 60% between 2015 and 2024. It has rolled out equipment that would likely be employed in a Taiwan invasion, including missiles, new aircraft and attack drones, its most advanced aircraft carrier and new ships that can form mobile piers to move equipment and troops ashore.
Even if 2027 doesn’t represent a deadline for an invasion, China’s moves to strengthen its military, or shifting demands on U.S. forces such as the conflict in Iran, could increase the possibility of an attack.
“If Beijing’s perception of its relative military capability increases and it believes the U.S. advantage has disappeared, then deterrence inevitably weakens,” said Sarah Beran, a former U.S. diplomat and director for China and Taiwan at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. “And that certainly increases the likelihood of military action.”
Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com, Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com and Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com