People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Chief of General Staff Chen Bingde (陳炳德), who visited Washington last week, caused a bit of a stir when he claimed that China only had a garrison deployment across from Taiwan and did not have operational deployments, much less missiles, stationed there.
While those comments were immediately ridiculed by Taiwanese authorities and the US Department of Defense, the fact of the matter is that Chen wasn’t lying outright — the veracity of his claim depends on how one defines “across from Taiwan.”
One thing that history should have taught us about negotiating with China is that it’s all about the context. If what Chen meant by “across from Taiwan” was China’s Fujian Province, then technically he was telling the truth, as the Second Artillery — the unit responsible for the bulk of China’s missile arsenal — has maintained a garrison in Fujian for more than a decade and it is not altogether impossible that missiles are not permanently deployed there.
As is often the case, however, the pith of the matter lies in what Chinese officials did not say. In the present case, what Chen omitted is that elsewhere in China, the missile threat against Taiwan continues to expand and is doing so despite ostensibly warmer relations between Taipei and Beijing. As the range, precision and potential destructiveness of the PLA missile arsenal grows, “across from Taiwan” loses all meaning, at least up to the point where the missiles are no longer within range.
This may sound trivial, but this would not be so if Beijing were to offer to dismantle its missiles targeting Taiwan — as the US and Taipei have long demanded — whereupon specificity, rather than vagueness, will be key. If, at some point, Beijing were to take “seriously” requests that it dismantle or pull back its missiles, lack of specificity could allow it to get away with murder (“If the missiles don’t exist, how can we dismantle them?” China could rightly ask).
The Second Artillery’s Base 52, which is headquartered “across from Taiwan” in Huangshan, Anhui Province, has at least six short-range missile brigades in Fujian, Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, all intended for a Taiwan contingency. Several of the delivery systems are road mobile, while other missiles and their components can be distributed to any of the six brigades throughout Southeast China and launched from there.
The 70-year-old Chen wasn’t showing signs of senility when he made those comments in Washington, nor did he think that US officials, who have substantial imagery intelligence proving the contrary, were fools. Rather, he was setting the scene for what could eventually become the parameters for negotiations on Taiwan. While we can already expect Beijing to observe commitments in the breach, it is also known that it will exploit to the fullest whatever room to maneuver it is given as a result of the other side’s failure to request specifics. This is China’s negotiating style, as any British official who handled talks in the 1980s ahead of Hong Kong’s retrocession in 1997 would tell us.
Chinese officials aren’t being vague out of carelessness or some ideological proclivity for imprecision; they know exactly what they are doing and they thrive on our failure to see their game, or when we approach negotiations with a sense of cultural superiority.
Chen knows the map of China and is well informed on the number of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as artillery, the PLA has targeted at Taiwan. What he and his masters count on is our ignorance and our impatience as we rush headlong whenever we see a possibility of signing just about any agreement with China.
Since COVID-19 broke out in Taiwan, there has been a fair amount of news regarding discrimination and “witch hunts” against medical personnel, people under self-quarantine and other targets, such as the students of a school where an infection was discovered. Quarantine breakers are almost certainly on the loose and it is only natural for people to be vigilant. One in Chiayi was found by accident at a traffic stop because his helmet was not fastened. However, those who follow the rules by quarantining themselves should be encouraged to keep up the good work in a difficult situation, instead of being
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator-at-large Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) has said that there is a huge difference between Chinese military aircraft circling Taiwan along the edges of its airspace and invading Taiwan’s airspace. He also said that whether it is US or Chinese aircraft flying along or encircling Taiwan’s airspace, there is no legal basis to say that such actions imply a clear provocation of Taiwan, and asked the Ministry of National Defense not to mislead the public. People who hear this might think that it is not a very Taiwanese thing to say. US military activity in the vicinity of Taiwan
As the nation welcomes home Taiwanese who had been stranded in China’s Hubei Province — arguably one of the most dangerous places on Earth since the novel coronavirus outbreak began in its capital, Wuhan, late last year — problems surrounding the “quasi-charter flights” that brought them back have been largely overlooked. The media used the term to describe the two flights dispatched by Taiwan’s state-run China Airlines because they do not count as charter flights. Taiwanese wanting to board those flights had to travel — most likely by train — more than 1,000km from Hubei to Shanghai Pudong International Airport
As the COVID-19 pandemic spins out of control, many parts of the world are experiencing shortages of medical masks and other protective equipment. I am studying in Washington state, which at the time of writing is the US state that has suffered the largest number of deaths from the novel coronavirus. The week before last, UW Medicine — an organization that includes the University of Washington School of Medicine and associated medical centers and clinics — sent its volunteers an e-mail asking the public to make masks and donate them to hospitals. Attached to the message was a mask donation
RSS