Look for Communist China to rev up intimidation of the island democracy of Taiwan as campaigning intensifies for next month’s election of a new president of the Republic of China.

We’ve seen the early signs of renewed Communist Chinese threats against Taiwan in the form of flights by fighters and bombers of the People’s Liberation Air Force within the island’s air defense identification zone on what Beijing calls “joint combat readiness patrols.”

The Republic of China authorities expect the People’s Republic of China to order such patrols right up to the election of the president, and members of Taiwan’s legislative yuan, or parliament, on January 13. The real worry is, if the communists don’t like the outcome, they’ll hype up the scare tactics.

“Our abiding hope is there will be a peaceful resolution,” the American ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution at Washington. “We insist on that,” he said. “The status quo of the past seven decades has kept the peace” — an uneasy standoff  that’s prevailed despite the vows of President Xi to bring the island under Chinese rule

The campaign for president of the Republic of China may be more intense than usual this year. It reflects two divergent trends among the island’s 23.3 million people, the vast majority of whom are real Taiwanese — that is, Chinese whose ancestors came over from the mainland hundreds of years ago, in contrast to those who fled the mainland after the Communist conquest in China’s civil war.

The president of the Chinese Republic, Tsai Ing-wen of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, is Taiwanese, and she’s fully endorsing her vice president, Lai Ching-te, in his bid to succeed her.

Mr. Lai, a medical doctor, has upset up not only Beijing but his political foes in Taiwan by remarking that Taiwan is de facto “a sovereign country” — a phrase that hints the next step should be for Taiwan to declare independence and put paid to fears that Mr. Xi would then make good on his vows to invade the island.

In the face of shrill criticism, Mr. Lai qualified that comment by saying there’s “no need” for Taiwan “to declare independence.” That’s the rationale of President Tsai, who has avoided unnecessarily upsetting Beijing by “free China” sloganeering.

Inside Taiwan, the controversy has resulted in an inversion of attitudes toward Beijing that one would hardly have imagined when the late leader of the Kuomintang or Chinese “Nationalist” Party, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, led his defeated forces to the island as Mao’s Red Army was nearing victory in 1949.

So powerful was the ruling Kuomintang, known as the KMT, that it exercised a dictatorship over the island, imposing martial law and slaughtering several thousand dissidents — in addition to thousands more killed in the era of “White Terror” on Taiwan before the KMTs defeat on the mainland.

It was under the generalissimo’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, that martial law ended in 1987, one year before his death. Ms. Tsai, who was born at Taipei and whose Taiwanese father repaired motor vehicles, was elected president in 2016 and again in 2020.

Only 10 percent of the island’s citizens are KMT mainlanders or their children or grandchildren, but the KMT candidate, a former police chief and now mayor of the capital New Taipei region, Hou You-yi, is winning support among business people with pleas for much improved relations with Beijing. The KMT vice chairman  is leading a delegation to China promoting peace and prosperity.

With two other rival candidates in the race, Mr. Lai counts on splitting the votes of critics of the government and coasting to victory, an outcome that is sure to provoke outcries from Beijing.

“Since the DPP victory in 2016, China has frozen official communication with the party and increased economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure and military activities,” says Rosie Levine at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.  Mr. Lai, she said, “will have to not only defend his own policy positions but will also have to answer for actions of his party.”

At Brookings, Ambassador Burns says, “We want freedom of navigation” in both the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits, where Chinese warships and planes imposed a virtual blockade during Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.

In the face of the Chinese war games, designed  to scare Taiwan and challenge America’s commitment to defense of the island, “Our policy has not changed,” Mr. Burns insists. “We are looking forward to January 13.” When I asked him what the Chinese might do “if the wrong candidate wins,” he snapped, “I don’t discuss politics.”