TAIPEI – Months after eliminating a popular challenge to its rule in Hong Kong, China is turning to an even higher-stakes target: self-governing Taiwan. The island has been bracing for conflict with China for decades, and in some respects, that battle has now begun.
It’s not the final, titanic clash that Taiwan has long feared, with Chinese troops storming the beaches. Instead, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s two-million-strong military, has launched a form of “gray zone” warfare. In this irregular type of conflict, which stops short of an actual shooting war, the aim is to subdue the foe through exhaustion.
Beijing is conducting waves of threatening forays from the air while ratcheting up existing pressure tactics to erode Taiwan’s will to resist, say current and former senior Taiwanese and U.S. military officers. The flights, they say, complement amphibious landing exercises, naval patrols, cyber attacks and diplomatic isolation.
The risk of conflict is now at its highest level in decades. PLA aircraft are flying menacingly towards airspace around Taiwan almost daily, sometimes launching multiple sorties on the same day. Since mid-September, Chinese warplanes have flown more than 100 of these missions, according to a Reuters compilation of flight data drawn from official statements by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. The data shows that in periods when political tension across the Taiwan Strait peaks, China sends more aircraft, including some of its most potent fighters and bombers.
These encroachment tactics are “super effective,” Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who until last year was the commander of the Taiwanese military, told Reuters in an interview. “You say it’s your garden, but it turns out that it is your neighbor who’s hanging out in the garden all the time. With that action, they are making a statement that it’s their garden - and that garden is one step away from your house.”
Under President Xi Jinping, China has accelerated the development of forces the PLA would need one day to conquer the island of 23 million - a mission that is the country’s top military priority, according to Chinese and Western analysts. With Hong Kong and the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang under ever-tighter control, Taiwan is the last remaining obstacle to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. In a major speech early last year, Xi said that Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a Chinese province, “must be, will be” unified with China. He set no deadline but would not rule out the use of force.
There has been a “clear shift” this year in Beijing’s posture, a senior Taiwanese security official responsible for intelligence on China told Reuters. Chinese military and government agencies have switched from decades of “theoretical talk” about taking Taiwan by force to debating and working on plans for possible military action, the official said.
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This is an excellent piece that gives a detailed discussion of the very real threat China poses to Taiwan and the ability of Taiwan to resist an armed attack. I am somewhat worried that the complete non-response from the international community to China's brutal subjugation of Hong Kong, it's invasion and continued occupation of Tibet, the wholesale repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xianjian including mass incarceration in what can only be described as concentration camps, and China's creation of fortified artificial islands in the international waters of the South China Sea, can only be reinforcing Xi's belief that the international community is incapable of any meaningful coordinated response to China's ongoing outrages.
And it must be said plainly that the military occupation by Bejing of Taiwan would be a strategic calamity both for the entire region and the United States. It would give China a base of operations capable of threatening all of the independent states in the region, including Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand as well as the capacity for the Chinese Navy to project itself into the broad reaches of the Pacific.
You're the navy guy. What's the best course of action?
ReplyDeleteWell there isn't much that can be done in the immediate future. Trump is a lame duck president and he has strained relations with most of our allies (Israel being the glaring exception). But if I were advising the incoming administration, I would start right off by repairing the relationships with our allies. And I'd try to get an agreement to launch a coordinated campaign of gradually increasing economic pressure on China until they stop behaving like the neighborhood bully. That should be done discreetly to start, in order to allow Beijing to avoid any loss of face. But we need a broad agreement on how the rest of the developed world will react if China launches an invasion. That should include complete diplomatic and economic isolation, not excluding a global trade embargo. Nor should we go out of our way to try to keep these discussions super secret. Not that China wouldn't find out anyway. Their intelligence service is one of the world's best. But the object would partly be deterrence.
ReplyDeleteBeyond that The US has already started refocusing its military and intelligence assets towards the western Pacific. That needs to continue. The Marines stationed in Okinawa should be brought back up to divisional strength and contingency plans should be made to deploy them rapidly to Taiwan if it looks like the balloon is about to go up. If we ever did that Beijing would blow a gasket so this should be filed under "extreme last resort" to deter an imminent invasion. I'd probably also talk to Tokyo and the Australians about the possibility of hosting another forward based carrier battle group. Beyond that we need to conduct periodic show the flag ops in the waters between the PRC and Taiwan. And in the course we could quietly chart the waters to prepare to rapidly deploy maritime mine fields if required.
After Taiwan, Mongolia?
ReplyDeleteAside from some rare earth metals, there is nothing in Mongolia touching on US interests.
ReplyDeleteI should have added, after Mongolia, and a little facetiously, Tannu-Tuva.
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, Taiwan, if it were something like "The Republic of Taiwan," might be worthy of our support, but it, like the Communist regime, claims to be "China," no more and no less. That being the case, I don't see it as any business of ours to intervene if one of the parties to the conflict decides to "resolve" this suspended civil war.