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.
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