The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) provided several reasons for military drills it conducted in five zones around Taiwan on Monday and yesterday.
The first was as a warning to “Taiwanese independence forces” to cease and desist. This is a consistent line from the Chinese authorities. The second was that the drills were aimed at “deterrence” of outside military intervention.
Monday’s announcement of the drills was the first time that Beijing has publicly used the second reason for conducting such drills. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is clearly rattled by “external forces” apparently consolidating around an intention to intervene.
The targets of the drills, while not specified, were surely the US — which announced an unprecedented US$11.1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan just 11 days before they commenced — and Japan after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi angered Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) by stating facts, that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could necessitate a reaction from the Japan Self-Defense Forces.
The drills were not simply about operational readiness; they were about messaging: to Taiwan, to regional players and to the US.
To the former, the message was that “resistance is futile”; to the latter two, it was: “Keep out of affairs that do not concern you.”
There is another possible target audience — reassuring a domestic audience — as identified by Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然), China director at the Eurasia Group.
The drills were announced only a week after Chinese General Yang Zhibin (楊志斌) was promoted to commander of the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command (ETC). The ETC’s strategic focus is Taiwan and Japan. The ETC leadership has been rocked by a series of military purges. Yang’s promotion comes after his predecessor, Lin Shangyang (林向陽), was removed in October for “violating party discipline and laws,” one of nine PLA generals and admirals expelled that month.
In a synopsis titled “Leadership Turmoil Impacts Eastern Theater Command Readiness,” written for the China Brief of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, a nonpartisan defense policy think tank, Zi Yang, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, lays out the suspicions of external observers.
Although “the PLA currently fields the most advanced military hardware in its history ... the quality and stability of its leadership remain dubious,” Zi wrote. “This level of senior command instability inevitably erodes readiness, disrupts decisionmaking, and damages cohesion and morale among officers.”
That is, there is reason to doubt the operational readiness of the PLA, and in particular the ETC, despite the bluster in evidence around Taiwan on Monday and yesterday.
As the Taipei Times’ On Taiwan columnist Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, wrote (“China’s bullying of Japan is backfiring in the Taiwan Strait,” Dec. 29, page 8), China has badly misjudged the situation in its reaction to Takaichi’s comments and “laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states.”
Instead of achieving a deterrence effect, China is essentially internationalizing the Taiwan issue further. Chellaney’s analysis is equally applicable to this week’s drills.
China and the PLA were not the only ones leveraging the messaging potential of the drills. On Monday, Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) asked the Chinese authorities “to react rationally and ... not to misjudge the situation.”
The message from the Presidential Office was that China has indeed misjudged the situation. If the PLA had wanted other regional players to regard Taiwan as an “internal matter” so that it could wage war on a sovereign, democratic state unhindered, it should have been more careful about its bellicose signaling. Taiwan is no longer the “troublemaker undermining regional peace,” to use Kuo’s description of the CCP: It is Taiwan that is “closely cooperat[ing] with all parties in the region to jointly protect the rules-based international order” and “safeguard[ing] peace, stability and security in the Indo-Pacific” region — appeals to governments of the likes of South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Europe, the UK and ASEAN — while Beijing is doing the exact opposite.
This message was reiterated by President William Lai (賴清德) in a Facebook post yesterday, in which he said that the CCP has recently been increasing tensions in the region, which was not the behavior of a responsible great power.
That much is evident.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice. The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era —
After 37 US lawmakers wrote to express concern over legislators’ stalling of critical budgets, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) pledged to make the Executive Yuan’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) special defense budget a top priority for legislative review. On Tuesday, it was finally listed on the legislator’s plenary agenda for Friday next week. The special defense budget was proposed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration in November last year to enhance the nation’s defense capabilities against external threats from China. However, the legislature, dominated by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), repeatedly blocked its review. The
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
RSS