Dr. Li's proposal is the most institutionally detailed version of a One Country Two Systems framework for Taiwan anyone has published in years, and the sequence Pekingnology documents here, two TAO press conferences where state media reporters raised the essays and Beijing declined to reject a single term, makes the surrounding signal as interesting as the text itself.
I've written a full response from Hong Kong engaging directly with the proposal. I agree with the constitutional architecture. I push back on the Hong Kong diagnosis, specifically the reading of what happened with Article 45 and the 2014 universal suffrage vote, and I argue the semiconductor leverage Dr. Li is implicitly relying on is a melting ice cube that changes the timeline for everything he's proposing.
Great article! I think it’s well past time to have the conversation.
The question is not…can you trust China? But can you trust the United States? A small political entity like Taiwan cannot be without a sponsor in the coming multipolar.
As it is, our ability to secure any deal is a wasting asset.
In terms of reneging, it’s true there is no higher power for Taiwan to appeal to if Beijing should renege.
Therefore, Taiwan and Beijing should work out a deal that makes sense for both.
I’ve had a mainland friend say to me, the best thing Taiwan can do for its continued autonomy is to be really well-governed. Giving Beijing no reason to interfere is the best security guarantee.
I don’t believe in the comic book evil version of Beijing. I really don’t think they mind if Taiwan has free speech or gay pride parades. The amount of control appropriate for 1.4 billion may be higher than for 23 million. However, we should have good discussion prior to a deal to find out where Beijings red lines are. Probably no succession, no chaos and of course no foreign collusion. If we can do that Beijing will be happy enough to let the cow eat the grass.
If I may weigh in (not being from Taiwan or the mainland), I think a bottom line for China is that Taiwanese politics must be free of Western interference. Which means Taiwan will need certain national security rules and foreign interference restriction rules, with Beijing reserving a power to step in if Taiwan’s political parties effectively become captured by foreign actors (especially CIA and its proxies). Also, if Taiwan were to retain its own military, it would never be allowed to have any links with foreign militaries other than the mainland. And in the event of a war (say between China and Japan), the mainland would automatically take control of the Taiwan military, similar to how the S Korean military is subordinate to the US military. So there would need to be regular exercises between the PLA and Taiwan military to prepare for this scenario.
Otherwise, I don’t see any issue with Taiwan having its one fiscal, monetary, trade policies, issue its own passport and even participate in international organisations as a province of China.
I don't think "foreign interference" in Hong Kong meant primarily foreign money or foreign intelligence services, though those existed too. It meant foreign media, and I think that channel did more damage to Hong Kong's autonomy than any single political actor on the ground.
The 2019 slogan, "five demands, not one less," wasn't just a local position. It became an internationally celebrated one, amplified by outlets that covered every escalation as heroic resistance and covered the movement's own turn toward violence, storming the Legislative Council, petrol bombs at police stations, as regrettable but understandable collateral. That coverage told local leaders, on every side, that compromise would be read internationally as betrayal and escalation would be read as courage. No local politician could offer a partial deal into that environment and survive it. The information climate made the maximalist position the only viable one, long before Beijing's National Security Law ever entered the picture.
So I agree with Angelica, but I'd sharpen it: it's not just that a foreign-interference floor should have applied to Hong Kong from day one. It's that the floor needed to specifically cover the media channel, not just political funding or foreign military links, because in Hong Kong's case that was the channel doing the actual work of making a negotiated outcome impossible.
There's not a good chance that any of these conditions would be accepted by anything like a majority in Taiwan, or even a very large minority. As Li points out, on the Taiwan side, any agreement would have to have majority Taiwanese support - if not enthusiasm - to be accepted and enforced. Taiwan is now a democracy, and as such, it can't just "hand itself over" without mass public consent. That would be hard to get.
Li addresses the idea of using coercion or force to bypass that consent, and coercion obviates the need for the agreement in the first place. What would remain after that would be a question of governing a likely rebellious Taiwanese population, an entirely different discussion. How many Taiwanese would need to be "disappeared" or "dealt with" in Laogai or their equivalent, until Taiwanese society had been forcibly remade? As such, discussion of one country, two systems is meaningless, except as an imposed tool of coercive governance to maintain control of a hostile population after violent conquest.
The utility of this discussion is in demonstrating how impossible a mutually-agreed annexation of Taiwan would actually be. The truth, obvious to everyone on the ground except those motivated to deny Taiwan's sociological reality, is that this imagined peaceful unification is impossible for actual Taiwanese people to accept.
However, as a means of self-restraint, the fiction of "peaceful reunification" is valuable, as a form of self-restraint the PRC imposes on itself. It gives China an out when confronting the reality of Taiwan's ongoing independence, a lie that allows Beijing not to act.
This has been the tacit reality for some time. Beijing pretends that peaceful unification is possible, pushes for it, Taiwan resists. Demands that can't be met are ignored. Beijing assumes the two countries are growing together, even when this is clearly not the case. Beijing's ability to script PRC responses without opposition allows it to pretend.
But as Beijing increasingly admits that peaceful unification is impossible, the kabuki theatre degrades. Once Beijing publicly admits that peaceful unification will never happen, Beijing has a number of choices. These could include:
1) Abandoning the idea of unification with Taiwan. Observers can estimate the likelihood of this.
2) Taking away the stick and using mostly carrot, pushing unification out endlessly. This would presumably have the option of abandoning unification should enticements not prove effective. This seems unlikely, if only taking Beijing's past and its rhetoric and actions into account. What seems more likely is the mostly-stick-some-carrot model that has been the case since the 1990's, with its risks, and the ever-receding possibility of a mutually agreed upon solution.
3) Withdrawing from global patterns of trade and institutions that allow Taiwan to be independent, as it is now - no longer trading with any state that trades with Taiwan, imposing its own sanctions on countries that allow travel to/from Taiwan or that extend all but declared diplomatic recognition to it, etc. This seems self-destructive and would economically cripple China. That amount of self-harm seems unlikely, so China will remain unable to prevent other countries from helping Taiwan function independently in all but name.
I'm sure there are other options, but they would be equally hampered by Beijing's regional and hegemonic ambitions.
As for allowing Taiwan to continue on its way, that also presents a problem to Beijing. Beijing monitors Chinese living abroad and cultivates power through persecution under the radar of other countries' domestic security- informal "police stations" to monitor Chinese living abroad, interference in the domestic politics of other countries through the PRC citizens living overseas, etc. Going back decades, Chinese embassies have been linked to mass co-ordinated attempts to coerce local governments. "Confucius Institutes" were a soft-power approach, and their failure and the resulting backlash have done little but inoculate other societies to further attempts. Whole organizations track United Front actions abroad, from the academy to the press, with varying levels of reaction.
Beijing doesn't tolerate dissent at home, or, apparently, abroad. Its first instinct always seems to be to subvert and coerce, and this leads to repression of dissent where possible. Domestically, no organization is allowed to grow unless it's de facto controlled by the party, encompassing all organizations from single-issue groups to religious organizations to social and cultural foundations.
Thus, how could China permit a massive island of millions of people, speaking and writing in Chinese, to permanently oppose policy and national identity as imposed by Beijing? If the very fact of Taiwan's existence is intolerable to Beijing, then continued coercion is a ratchet, not a steady state, and it tends toward war over time.
Any 1C2S agreement with Taiwan would require powerful restraint on Beijing. Given that Beijing doesn't even see international boundaries as limits on its attempts to suppress dissent and impose social control, what frameworks would or could Taiwan find acceptable?
I find it far more likely that Beijing's hawks will have precisely one path: Determining when the war for the conquest of Taiwan will happen, not if.
As the discussion points out, Beijing for its part appears to view One Country, Two Systems as a form of less violent and slower conquest. In the discussion, the notion of changing leverage over time is a tacit admission that Taiwan could never trust Beijing to honour the terms of 1C2S because the goals on either side are fundamentally opposed.
Getting Beijing to abandon goals of full incorporation of Taiwan is the trick. Li names this as the real test, I would argue the only test worth pursuing.
Absent that, Taiwanese agreement to any terms would be hard to imagine. The only means to achieve that would likely be, as the discussion clearly demonstrates, for some form of enforceable rules which permanently bar Beijing from further forcing open Taiwan politically.
A constitutional mechanism for doing that, as the discussion notes, relies entirely on the PRC's willingness to adhere to it.
For Taiwanese, outside of the most dedicated core of the Blues, this discussion isn't much more than an object lesson: There is no peaceful solution if unification is on the table, so Taiwan has to be well-armed and have alliances to ensure that resistance to Beijing is possible and likely. It has to make the cost of PRC coercion extremely high for Beijing and maintain a large, active deterrent to invasion.
Chief among those strategies is reaffirming the "porcupine" strategy, to make Taiwan so painful for China that it would wreck a hundred years of economic development and cost hundreds of thousands in PRC military lives.
WMDs as potential retaliation is a cost-effective and war-preventing move against a permanently hostile enemy. Nuclear weapons as the solution almost writes itself. If the US nuclear umbrella is unreliable - which seems likely - then Taiwan needs its own.
This nuclear deterrent could be achieved clandestinely, especially with the US retreating into self-isolation. While the development period would be dangerous, so long as invasion was deterred, it would be too late for China to act. This window would invite preventive air strikes, which Taiwan's deterrent would have to cover. Taiwan's existing missiles, which can reach the mainland, would play the role Seoul-facing artillery played for Pyongyang. And as for North Korea, regional geopolitics can act as a shield, playing the role of benefactor for Taiwan, as China played for North Korea.
This logic also applies to Japan. And now that China has shielded North Korea while it became a nuclear weapons power, even while half-heartedly claiming it opposed Pyongyang's goals, this logic also applies even more to South Korea. In South Korea, a majority support South Korea becoming a nuclear power. At some point, likely very soon, that option will be politically available.
Far from generating a relaxation of tension in Asia, China's pressure on Taiwan, by the logic of self-defence on all sides, will move the entire region into a permanent standoff between an assertive, regionally hegemonic PRC and everyone else, from Vietnam to South Korea. This has to be doubly true if the US is retreating into self-isolation. In that scenario, Taiwan will have deep encouragement from other players in the region to rebuff any move towards unification with China and the strategic viability of that resistance to China will become more compelling.
The utility of this discussion of unification is in showing that peaceful, negotiated unification is pragmatically impossible. Taiwan can't give itself away because it's a democracy whose people would have to agree to any terms, and halfway-house terms that are meant in time to be replaced with Beijing's de facto conquest will never be agreed to. Second is the issue of trust. It's beyond reason that anyone in Taiwan will ever sufficiently trust Beijing to allow this process to commence without PRC guarantees that would make the deal unacceptable to Beijing. With two completely irreconcilable demands on the future, peace through the active Taiwanese deterrence of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely the only path forward that doesn't involve war and either China's failure or some form of brutal military occupation of Taiwan.
Wishful thinking isn't useful. Those wanting to prevent violence might best place their efforts in constraining Beijing's scope of action by advocating for an assertive deterrent in Taiwan, or else, at some point, if Beijing senses weakness and an opportunity for invasion, the region is likely to be plunged into a generation of warfare.
The resulting tacit lesson of this discussion for Taiwanese is very obvious.
What about Taiwan’s military procurement under the One Country Two Systems? No ruler seated in Beijing would accept the idea that a provincial governor, because that’s what a Taiwanese president would be under the system, can overstep the central government’s authority to procure weapons from countries that usually are hostile to the central government itself. I see that the author deliberately avoided discussing this matter. From what the author had laid out, Beijing can realistically accept all of Taiwan’s demands. The only counter-demand is that Taiwan’s armed forces have to be supplied by Beijing.
Your heart ❤️ is in the right place and you are knowledgeable
But
Can you really trust China and Xi?
Recent world events have reminded us that when push comes to shove it’s about who has the most power.
As you mention Hong Kong didn’t work out well and it need not have gone that way for China to both honor its word and get what it needed from Hong Kong.
Should Ukraine 🇺🇦 trust Putin and Russia 🇷🇺? I think not. Security guarantees? From who? Again look at Ukraine. Would anyone trust USA guarantees? I think not. NATO? Even if given do they have the capability? For Taiwan? 🇹🇼. There is no one. So like Blanche Dubois they will depend on the kindness of strangers ? In the constitution? Even if they did Xi could violate Putin put parts of eastern Ukraine into the Russian constitution. Kind of makes peace hard.
Maybe the thought is they will get absorbed eventually so why not surrender now and get the best terms ?
Dr. Li's proposal is the most institutionally detailed version of a One Country Two Systems framework for Taiwan anyone has published in years, and the sequence Pekingnology documents here, two TAO press conferences where state media reporters raised the essays and Beijing declined to reject a single term, makes the surrounding signal as interesting as the text itself.
I've written a full response from Hong Kong engaging directly with the proposal. I agree with the constitutional architecture. I push back on the Hong Kong diagnosis, specifically the reading of what happened with Article 45 and the 2014 universal suffrage vote, and I argue the semiconductor leverage Dr. Li is implicitly relying on is a melting ice cube that changes the timeline for everything he's proposing.
The piece is here: https://theescalatorhk.com/a-response-to-dr-li-this-is-our-chance-not-our-cautionary-tale/
Great article! I think it’s well past time to have the conversation.
The question is not…can you trust China? But can you trust the United States? A small political entity like Taiwan cannot be without a sponsor in the coming multipolar.
As it is, our ability to secure any deal is a wasting asset.
In terms of reneging, it’s true there is no higher power for Taiwan to appeal to if Beijing should renege.
Therefore, Taiwan and Beijing should work out a deal that makes sense for both.
I’ve had a mainland friend say to me, the best thing Taiwan can do for its continued autonomy is to be really well-governed. Giving Beijing no reason to interfere is the best security guarantee.
I don’t believe in the comic book evil version of Beijing. I really don’t think they mind if Taiwan has free speech or gay pride parades. The amount of control appropriate for 1.4 billion may be higher than for 23 million. However, we should have good discussion prior to a deal to find out where Beijings red lines are. Probably no succession, no chaos and of course no foreign collusion. If we can do that Beijing will be happy enough to let the cow eat the grass.
If I may weigh in (not being from Taiwan or the mainland), I think a bottom line for China is that Taiwanese politics must be free of Western interference. Which means Taiwan will need certain national security rules and foreign interference restriction rules, with Beijing reserving a power to step in if Taiwan’s political parties effectively become captured by foreign actors (especially CIA and its proxies). Also, if Taiwan were to retain its own military, it would never be allowed to have any links with foreign militaries other than the mainland. And in the event of a war (say between China and Japan), the mainland would automatically take control of the Taiwan military, similar to how the S Korean military is subordinate to the US military. So there would need to be regular exercises between the PLA and Taiwan military to prepare for this scenario.
Otherwise, I don’t see any issue with Taiwan having its one fiscal, monetary, trade policies, issue its own passport and even participate in international organisations as a province of China.
I don't think "foreign interference" in Hong Kong meant primarily foreign money or foreign intelligence services, though those existed too. It meant foreign media, and I think that channel did more damage to Hong Kong's autonomy than any single political actor on the ground.
The 2019 slogan, "five demands, not one less," wasn't just a local position. It became an internationally celebrated one, amplified by outlets that covered every escalation as heroic resistance and covered the movement's own turn toward violence, storming the Legislative Council, petrol bombs at police stations, as regrettable but understandable collateral. That coverage told local leaders, on every side, that compromise would be read internationally as betrayal and escalation would be read as courage. No local politician could offer a partial deal into that environment and survive it. The information climate made the maximalist position the only viable one, long before Beijing's National Security Law ever entered the picture.
So I agree with Angelica, but I'd sharpen it: it's not just that a foreign-interference floor should have applied to Hong Kong from day one. It's that the floor needed to specifically cover the media channel, not just political funding or foreign military links, because in Hong Kong's case that was the channel doing the actual work of making a negotiated outcome impossible.
I agree. I think it would have been much better for HK if those rules were in from day one.
There's not a good chance that any of these conditions would be accepted by anything like a majority in Taiwan, or even a very large minority. As Li points out, on the Taiwan side, any agreement would have to have majority Taiwanese support - if not enthusiasm - to be accepted and enforced. Taiwan is now a democracy, and as such, it can't just "hand itself over" without mass public consent. That would be hard to get.
Li addresses the idea of using coercion or force to bypass that consent, and coercion obviates the need for the agreement in the first place. What would remain after that would be a question of governing a likely rebellious Taiwanese population, an entirely different discussion. How many Taiwanese would need to be "disappeared" or "dealt with" in Laogai or their equivalent, until Taiwanese society had been forcibly remade? As such, discussion of one country, two systems is meaningless, except as an imposed tool of coercive governance to maintain control of a hostile population after violent conquest.
The utility of this discussion is in demonstrating how impossible a mutually-agreed annexation of Taiwan would actually be. The truth, obvious to everyone on the ground except those motivated to deny Taiwan's sociological reality, is that this imagined peaceful unification is impossible for actual Taiwanese people to accept.
However, as a means of self-restraint, the fiction of "peaceful reunification" is valuable, as a form of self-restraint the PRC imposes on itself. It gives China an out when confronting the reality of Taiwan's ongoing independence, a lie that allows Beijing not to act.
This has been the tacit reality for some time. Beijing pretends that peaceful unification is possible, pushes for it, Taiwan resists. Demands that can't be met are ignored. Beijing assumes the two countries are growing together, even when this is clearly not the case. Beijing's ability to script PRC responses without opposition allows it to pretend.
But as Beijing increasingly admits that peaceful unification is impossible, the kabuki theatre degrades. Once Beijing publicly admits that peaceful unification will never happen, Beijing has a number of choices. These could include:
1) Abandoning the idea of unification with Taiwan. Observers can estimate the likelihood of this.
2) Taking away the stick and using mostly carrot, pushing unification out endlessly. This would presumably have the option of abandoning unification should enticements not prove effective. This seems unlikely, if only taking Beijing's past and its rhetoric and actions into account. What seems more likely is the mostly-stick-some-carrot model that has been the case since the 1990's, with its risks, and the ever-receding possibility of a mutually agreed upon solution.
3) Withdrawing from global patterns of trade and institutions that allow Taiwan to be independent, as it is now - no longer trading with any state that trades with Taiwan, imposing its own sanctions on countries that allow travel to/from Taiwan or that extend all but declared diplomatic recognition to it, etc. This seems self-destructive and would economically cripple China. That amount of self-harm seems unlikely, so China will remain unable to prevent other countries from helping Taiwan function independently in all but name.
I'm sure there are other options, but they would be equally hampered by Beijing's regional and hegemonic ambitions.
As for allowing Taiwan to continue on its way, that also presents a problem to Beijing. Beijing monitors Chinese living abroad and cultivates power through persecution under the radar of other countries' domestic security- informal "police stations" to monitor Chinese living abroad, interference in the domestic politics of other countries through the PRC citizens living overseas, etc. Going back decades, Chinese embassies have been linked to mass co-ordinated attempts to coerce local governments. "Confucius Institutes" were a soft-power approach, and their failure and the resulting backlash have done little but inoculate other societies to further attempts. Whole organizations track United Front actions abroad, from the academy to the press, with varying levels of reaction.
Beijing doesn't tolerate dissent at home, or, apparently, abroad. Its first instinct always seems to be to subvert and coerce, and this leads to repression of dissent where possible. Domestically, no organization is allowed to grow unless it's de facto controlled by the party, encompassing all organizations from single-issue groups to religious organizations to social and cultural foundations.
Thus, how could China permit a massive island of millions of people, speaking and writing in Chinese, to permanently oppose policy and national identity as imposed by Beijing? If the very fact of Taiwan's existence is intolerable to Beijing, then continued coercion is a ratchet, not a steady state, and it tends toward war over time.
Any 1C2S agreement with Taiwan would require powerful restraint on Beijing. Given that Beijing doesn't even see international boundaries as limits on its attempts to suppress dissent and impose social control, what frameworks would or could Taiwan find acceptable?
I find it far more likely that Beijing's hawks will have precisely one path: Determining when the war for the conquest of Taiwan will happen, not if.
As the discussion points out, Beijing for its part appears to view One Country, Two Systems as a form of less violent and slower conquest. In the discussion, the notion of changing leverage over time is a tacit admission that Taiwan could never trust Beijing to honour the terms of 1C2S because the goals on either side are fundamentally opposed.
Getting Beijing to abandon goals of full incorporation of Taiwan is the trick. Li names this as the real test, I would argue the only test worth pursuing.
Absent that, Taiwanese agreement to any terms would be hard to imagine. The only means to achieve that would likely be, as the discussion clearly demonstrates, for some form of enforceable rules which permanently bar Beijing from further forcing open Taiwan politically.
A constitutional mechanism for doing that, as the discussion notes, relies entirely on the PRC's willingness to adhere to it.
For Taiwanese, outside of the most dedicated core of the Blues, this discussion isn't much more than an object lesson: There is no peaceful solution if unification is on the table, so Taiwan has to be well-armed and have alliances to ensure that resistance to Beijing is possible and likely. It has to make the cost of PRC coercion extremely high for Beijing and maintain a large, active deterrent to invasion.
Chief among those strategies is reaffirming the "porcupine" strategy, to make Taiwan so painful for China that it would wreck a hundred years of economic development and cost hundreds of thousands in PRC military lives.
WMDs as potential retaliation is a cost-effective and war-preventing move against a permanently hostile enemy. Nuclear weapons as the solution almost writes itself. If the US nuclear umbrella is unreliable - which seems likely - then Taiwan needs its own.
This nuclear deterrent could be achieved clandestinely, especially with the US retreating into self-isolation. While the development period would be dangerous, so long as invasion was deterred, it would be too late for China to act. This window would invite preventive air strikes, which Taiwan's deterrent would have to cover. Taiwan's existing missiles, which can reach the mainland, would play the role Seoul-facing artillery played for Pyongyang. And as for North Korea, regional geopolitics can act as a shield, playing the role of benefactor for Taiwan, as China played for North Korea.
This logic also applies to Japan. And now that China has shielded North Korea while it became a nuclear weapons power, even while half-heartedly claiming it opposed Pyongyang's goals, this logic also applies even more to South Korea. In South Korea, a majority support South Korea becoming a nuclear power. At some point, likely very soon, that option will be politically available.
Far from generating a relaxation of tension in Asia, China's pressure on Taiwan, by the logic of self-defence on all sides, will move the entire region into a permanent standoff between an assertive, regionally hegemonic PRC and everyone else, from Vietnam to South Korea. This has to be doubly true if the US is retreating into self-isolation. In that scenario, Taiwan will have deep encouragement from other players in the region to rebuff any move towards unification with China and the strategic viability of that resistance to China will become more compelling.
The utility of this discussion of unification is in showing that peaceful, negotiated unification is pragmatically impossible. Taiwan can't give itself away because it's a democracy whose people would have to agree to any terms, and halfway-house terms that are meant in time to be replaced with Beijing's de facto conquest will never be agreed to. Second is the issue of trust. It's beyond reason that anyone in Taiwan will ever sufficiently trust Beijing to allow this process to commence without PRC guarantees that would make the deal unacceptable to Beijing. With two completely irreconcilable demands on the future, peace through the active Taiwanese deterrence of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely the only path forward that doesn't involve war and either China's failure or some form of brutal military occupation of Taiwan.
Wishful thinking isn't useful. Those wanting to prevent violence might best place their efforts in constraining Beijing's scope of action by advocating for an assertive deterrent in Taiwan, or else, at some point, if Beijing senses weakness and an opportunity for invasion, the region is likely to be plunged into a generation of warfare.
The resulting tacit lesson of this discussion for Taiwanese is very obvious.
What about Taiwan’s military procurement under the One Country Two Systems? No ruler seated in Beijing would accept the idea that a provincial governor, because that’s what a Taiwanese president would be under the system, can overstep the central government’s authority to procure weapons from countries that usually are hostile to the central government itself. I see that the author deliberately avoided discussing this matter. From what the author had laid out, Beijing can realistically accept all of Taiwan’s demands. The only counter-demand is that Taiwan’s armed forces have to be supplied by Beijing.
What does 國 really mean? Country is a very loose translation.
Your heart ❤️ is in the right place and you are knowledgeable
But
Can you really trust China and Xi?
Recent world events have reminded us that when push comes to shove it’s about who has the most power.
As you mention Hong Kong didn’t work out well and it need not have gone that way for China to both honor its word and get what it needed from Hong Kong.
Should Ukraine 🇺🇦 trust Putin and Russia 🇷🇺? I think not. Security guarantees? From who? Again look at Ukraine. Would anyone trust USA guarantees? I think not. NATO? Even if given do they have the capability? For Taiwan? 🇹🇼. There is no one. So like Blanche Dubois they will depend on the kindness of strangers ? In the constitution? Even if they did Xi could violate Putin put parts of eastern Ukraine into the Russian constitution. Kind of makes peace hard.
Maybe the thought is they will get absorbed eventually so why not surrender now and get the best terms ?
Not optimistic