The National People's Congress adopts a law stating that the PRC may employ "non-peaceful means" if Taiwan secedes, if a major incident entailing separation occurs, or if possibilities for peaceful reunification are exhausted.
Why it mattersThe law is the PRC's declared legal basis for the use of force and the closest thing to a stated threshold in the whole system. Its conditions are deliberately open to interpretation — including the third, which sets no external test at all — and it is quoted in most subsequent official PRC statements.