If the US does not pay more attention to the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, it will be “inviting a war,” an expert on Asian military affairs said on Monday.
“One side is already preparing for such a war,” International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC) senior fellow Richard Fisher said.
He was addressing a Capitol Hill forum — attended by US Congressional staffers — on growing Chinese military threats to Taiwan.
Fisher said that a central part of the “China dream” was to become the world’s dominant military power.
He said that for Taiwan to deter a Chinese attack on the nation, the US would have to do much more than it is.
A new generation of capability has to be made available, Fisher said.
He said that China wants to exploit Taiwan and use it as a military base.
According to Fisher “the pressure is going to be on” by the early 2020s and Taipei’s need for submarines was “without argument.”
He said that Washington should provide fighters to replace Taiwan’s aging French Dassault Mirage 2000s.
“If they can’t afford new F-16s, let us offer them used F-16s, or even a small number of F-35s, which are very expensive, but at least we could start training and building up capacity to a fifth-generation level,” he said.
Fisher said that energy weapons could be key to Taiwan’s needs and that 100 railguns could probably “take down” the bulk of a Chinese missile attack.
“If the Chinese understood that, they wouldn’t launch those missiles in the first place,” he said.
A Chinese invasion could look like “the reverse of Dunkirk” Fisher said, referring to a major World War II evacuation of Allied troops from France.
Beijing could probably transport eight to 12 divisions across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
He said that China would use thousands of civilian-owned barges and ships.
“Instead of rescuing people, this ‘Dunkirk’ fleet is going to be the invasion force,” he said.
Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, said that since 2009, China had become overbearing and militaristic.
“In other words, she is dangerous,” Waldron said.
He said that China is threatening Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam and India.
“That’s an awful lot of countries to be threatening at one time,” Waldron said.
He added: “China fully intends to achieve her goal. She believes that in 10 years time, she is going to own the South China Sea; she is going to be the harbormaster.”
“The US has done nothing that actually slows progress towards this goal,” he said. “No one has done anything to throw sand in the wheels.”
However, the nations under threat are not “potted plants” he said.
“They are reacting and they are beginning to rearm,” Waldron said.
He said that India is already a nuclear power and that others might also go nuclear to stop China.
Waldron said the US needed to tell China that if it attacked Taiwan, there would be a strong reaction.
Using an old gangster line, he said that Washington might tell Beijing: “You touch my daughter, I will break your legs.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods