China is once again putting its military might on display in order to threaten Taiwan. Hong Kong media outlets reported Tuesday that China would hold military exercises on Dongshan Island off Fujian Province. According to the reports, the exercises would involve large numbers of personnel, aircraft and submarines.
The purpose of making threats is to frighten one's opponent and in so doing to hijack that opponent's freedom to think and act. As long as no attack actually materializes, the threat of attack always remains. Former president Lee Teng-hui (
Lee, in his straightforward way, revealed what lies at the heart of China's military threats. China doesn't have to attack; by making occasional threats, it can always frighten some Taiwanese, ensuring that they don't dare contravene China's wishes.
But given the sensitivity and fragility of the international economic environment, China does not really need to invade Taiwan. It can hurt Taiwan more than enough by test-firing the occasional missile and complicating Taiwan's international relations -- for this is sufficient to cause investors to pull out of Taiwan, the stock market to crash, Taiwanese society to be disrupted and people to leave the country.
Since China stopped shelling Kinmen in the 1970s, Chinese threats have caused Taiwan's economic and political reform to make progress very slowly. Only US promises of military assistance have been able to relax the political and economic situation in Taiwan.
But China's threat-making has been constant, though new pretexts are sometimes provided for it. During the Lee era, China threatened Taiwan time and again, calling Lee a traitor and saying that he would be swept into the dustbin of history. Now that President Chen Shui-bian (
We don't know if the Chinese people should be proud or sorry that China, a country claiming to have a glorious 5,000 year-old culture, has become the nightmare of Taiwan, a country sharing its culture.
In short, it is difficult to reason with China's leaders -- so Taiwan must help itself.
Only by improving its military preparedness will Taiwan have any bargaining chips in cross-strait negotiations. Only by tightening military exchanges with the US and Japan and upgrading the nation's military hardware will Taiwan gain an effective deterrent against rash Chinese action.
China's military expenditures have increased over the years while those of Taiwan have gradually declined. To improve that nation's anti-missile equipment and strengthen its naval capability, yesterday the Cabinet finally proposed a NT$610.8 billion (US$17.9 billion) special budget to buy modern weapons from the US. Cabinet spokesman Chen Chi-mai (
Security across the Taiwan Strait is crucial not only to the development of Taiwan's politics and economy but also to regional peace in Asia. Once disorder occurs in Taiwan, it may damage the political and economic stability of neighboring countries -- such as Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries. In particular, as China's political and economic power increases, its military expansion threatens the military balance in East Asia.
The Chinese military expansion is indeed worrisome. No wonder US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher expressed his concern during a press briefing on Tuesday, saying that the US sees "the [Chinese] military buildup and missile deployments as destabilizing."
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS