On Friday last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered the latest in a long succession of warmongering speeches to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The speech is another worrisome indication that Xi appears to be hell-bent on military adventurism in the near future.
“On the path of completely building a modern socialist country and realizing the second centennial goal, national defense and the military must be placed in a more important position, and the consolidation of national defense and a strong military must be accelerated. We must persist in strengthening the overall planning of war and make preparations for military struggle,” the South China Morning Post cited Xi as saying.
Xi called on the “entire party and entire country” to work to realize the Chinese military’s long-term goals, saying that the military’s needs would need to be considered when drafting plans for societal and economic development.
This indicates that Xi intends to put China’s economy on a military footing; a frightening prospect. Following nearly three decades of double-digit defense budget increases, China has embarked on an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, while barely skipping a beat and maintaining a flourishing civilian economy. Imagine what China could achieve if it were to channel a much larger proportion of its formidable industrial base into military production, as Nazi Germany did in the 1930s.
Xi has repeatedly cautioned of the danger of a “peace disease.” Aside from firing on unarmed civilians during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, the PLA has not seen serious military action since China’s calamitous invasion of Vietnam in 1979. This appears to be gnawing away at Xi.
Xi’s words hint at two possible scenarios: a border war with India or, the jewel in the crown, a campaign to annex Taiwan.
Xi might favor the former, at least initially, as a high-altitude Himalayan border war with India would be containable due to the highly isolated location of the contested territory, while providing the PLA with some much needed combat experience ahead of a possible attempt to annex Taiwan. This might have been the motivation behind the PLA’s ambush of Indian border troops last year. Fortunately, India showed great restraint.
In a Chinese-language interview with Voice of America, published on Tuesday, Taiwan’s former chief of the general staff, admiral Lee Hsi-ming (李喜明), warned that the PLA does not have the ability to launch an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, but said that the final pieces of the puzzle might be snapped into place by 2027. That is just six years away.
Given the looming threat of invasion, it is questionable whether there is a sufficient sense of urgency within the government, military and wider society. Would it not be prudent, for instance, to begin building a serious volunteer civilian defense force, trained in sabotage and diversionary techniques, which could act as a significant deterrent force, and be unleashed should an invasion occur?
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) might understandably be reluctant to significantly increase defense spending, given conventional political wisdom that there are “no votes in defense.” Tsai might also be wary of unduly panicking the public.
Nevertheless, Taiwan, unique from any other democratic society in the world — save perhaps Israel — is faced with an existential threat within spitting distance of its borders. Despite this, life in Taiwan largely carries on as normal.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has demonstrated that it is more than capable of rising to the challenge during a national crisis. If the government were to set out a bold plan to shore up the nation’s defenses, the public would likely respond with equal maturity and sense of purpose.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS