The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading all over the world, sowing fear and throwing societies into disorder. However, this crisis has not stopped China from dispatching groups of warplanes to fly around the edge of Taiwan’s airspace and carry out “targeted” military exercises.
Despite the aggressive nature of these incidents, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Sz-huai (吳斯懷) said the fly-bys should not be considered provocative if the planes only fly around Taiwan’s airspace and do not intrude into it.
Rather than reconsidering these remarks, the retired general has continued to make arguments along the same lines.
He said that the government should consider whether it really needs to tell the public about every incident involving the Chinese military, instead of keeping quiet to avoid causing unnecessary anxiety.
Wu’s comments show that he lacks a sense of crisis about national security and is not well-versed in military strategy in the Asia-Pacific region.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been investing more and more each year in its military exercises simulating an invasion of Taiwan.
This shows that China’s ambition to launch a military attack on Taiwan has never changed.
In October 2016, Chinese diplomat and former UN deputy secretary-general Sha Zukang (沙祖康) stated that if Taiwanese authorities declared independence, the PLA would land on Taiwan the moment they did so, and that China would finish the job at any cost.
At the 2018 annual conference of China’s daily Global Times, retired PLA lieutenant general Wang Hongguang (王洪光), who until his retirement in December 2012 was deputy commander of the Nanjing Military Region, said that war could break out across the Taiwan Strait around this year, and that if it did, the PLA could take over Taiwan within 100 hours.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government has adopted new policies regarding China’s buildup of its navy and air force, its repeated excursions beyond the first island chain to conduct long-distance military exercises and its harassment of Taiwan’s peripheral air space, including flying across the median line of the Strait on several occasions.
Unlike the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), which concealed information about the activities of Chinese warplanes, Tsai’s government goes out of its way to let every member of the public and every social sector know how seriously the PLA is threatening Taiwan’s airspace and territorial waters.
This is the right approach and it helps build a common will among Taiwanese.
Publishing information about exercises by Chinese warplanes also has the strategic effect of indirectly showing other countries that Taiwan makes a significant contribution to maintaining security and stability across the Strait and bears its share of military responsibility.
The airspace over the Strait is covered by the world’s highest concentration of air defense radar arrays and anti-aircraft missile batteries.
Militarily, it is an extremely sensitive region.
By reporting incidents in which groups of PLA aircraft cross the median line, the government can draw the attention of the US, Japan and other countries, and encourage them to seriously question why such incidents occur.
Yao Chung-yuan is an adjunct professor at a university and former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning department.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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