The military exercises China launched yesterday have many purposes, including cognitive warfare against Taiwan, countering US-Japan military cooperation and the showcasing of coordination with Russia, an academic said yesterday.
Lin Ying-yu (林穎佑), an associate professor in Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies, said the drills were not solely a response to this month’s US arms sales to Taiwan, and other factors were also at play.
The drills were in part conducted in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s statements on a potential “Taiwan contingency,” as well as Tokyo’s increasingly close military cooperation with the US, Lin said.
Photo: Reuters
Last month, Takaichi said a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a threat to Japan’s survival and could warrant a military response from Tokyo, drawing an angry reaction from Beijing.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a new series of exercises around Taiwan, code-named “Justice Mission 2025,” which it said were meant as a “stern warning to Taiwanese independence separatist forces.”
The drills were a form of cognitive warfare, aimed at undermining Taiwanese morale by signaling to Taiwan that US and Japanese support might not translate into real assistance, Lin said.
China’s decision to launch the drills just before the New Year sent a strong “China-Russia joint action” signal, given that Moscow announced starting on Thursday it would hold a two-month live-fire military exercise in the Northern Territories, also known in Russia as the Kurils.
The PLA’s tactical logic is to leverage Russia’s threat in the north to constrain Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), preventing them from redeploying resources to Taiwan if tensions were to escalate in the Strait, Lin said.
Besides the pressure exerted by China and Russia, North Korea is also worth watching for any potential action, as this could be a way to constrain US forces stationed in South Korea, he said.
Lin said that if China, Russia, and North Korea were to act in coordination, it would align with a strategic concept the PLA has been developing in the past few years, known as the “five-sea integration.”
The concept envisions synchronized operations across the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and East China, Yellow and Philippine seas to challenge the defensive resilience of the first island chain, he said.
Former US Department of Defense senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia Tony Hu (胡振東) said that if a conflict were to break out in the Taiwan Strait, Russia would likely not intervene directly, but could constrain JSDF in the north, preventing them from reinforcing the south.
Other analysts said Beijing’s drills increasingly blur the line between routine military training exercises and what could be stage-setting for an attack, a strategy intended to give the US and its allies minimal warning of an assault.
Former Japanese vice minister of defense Yasuhide Nakayama yesterday in a social media post said that although China claims the drill is a “warning to pro-independence forces in Taiwan and external interference forces,” he believes the action is not just a military exercise, but a move with clear political and psychological messaging aimed at influencing Japanese society.
The Guardian yesterday quoted analysts as saying that it was the first time the PLA had explicitly said it was practicing deterring international involvement.
Also unusually, a number of PLA aircraft remained visible on radar platforms, it quoted the analysts as saying.
International Crisis Group’s senior northeast Asia analyst William Yang (楊晧暐) was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the drills would “test” US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Beijing was likely to “take into account the response from the US and carefully determine how it should formulate and plan the PLA’s military operations, including regular training and more tactical shows of force to pressure Taiwan,” he was quoted as saying.
Additional reporting by Lin Tsuei-yi
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