CIA Director William Burns on Saturday said that China is closely monitoring Russia’s conflict in Ukraine and that it is affecting Chinese leaders’ calculations over Taiwan.
Burns, speaking at a Financial Times event in Washington, said the Chinese government had been struck by Ukraine’s fierce resistance to Russia’s invasion and by the economic costs Russia is bearing.
“I think the Chinese leadership is looking very carefully at all this — at the costs and consequences of any effort to use force to gain control over Taiwan,” Burns said.
Photo: AP
However, he cautioned that it would not shift Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) long-term goals over Taiwan.
“I don’t for a minute think that this has eroded Xi’s determination over time to gain control over Taiwan,” Burns said. “But I think it’s something that’s affecting their calculation about how and when they go about doing that.”
China has refused to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine and has criticized Western sanctions on Moscow.
Beijing and Moscow declared a “no limits” strategic partnership several weeks before the Feb. 24 invasion, and have been forging closer energy and security ties in recent years to push back on the US and the West.
However, Burns said the US believed China was unsettled by the reputational damage of being associated with the “brutishness” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military action.
“I think what the bitter experience, in many ways, of Putin’s Russia in Ukraine over the last 10 or 11 weeks has done is demonstrate that that friendship actually does have some limits,” Burns said.
Separately, US Representative Mark Green on Thursday said China would face an even more united response than Russia is facing now if Beijing were to invade Taiwan.
Green made the remarks during an appearance at the NewsNation show On Balance with Leland Vittert, when Vittert asked: “Can the world come together against China if they invade Taiwan?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Green said, adding: “While you’re sort of looking at the difference between China and Russia, I’d suggest you look at the difference economically between Taiwan and Ukraine.”
“Taiwan makes 94 percent of all the high-end semiconductors. The West cannot tolerate China seizing control of Taiwan,” he said.
“So absolutely we are going to push back. Everyone is going to unite and probably even more so than with Ukraine,” he added.
Green said the US could and should do more to help Taiwan defend itself.
“What we’ve got to do is make the consequence of China attacking Taiwan so great that they choose not to do so. That’s real deterrence,” he said.
Additional reporting by staff writer
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS