China’s Fuzhou-Pingtan railway is not a military threat to Taiwan, a defense expert said on Saturday as Beijing opened a rail bridge that links Pingtan Island to Fuzhou Province.
Pingtan Island is about 130km northwest of Taiwan and the new bridge could reportedly allow train movements between China’s Fuzhou and the island in as little as 35 minutes.
Hsu Chih-hsiang (許智翔), a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that the railway’s economic and political value is greater than its military potential to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Well-utilized railways could greatly benefit an army, as the Prussians demonstrated in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, but insecure railways could become a bane to operations, as Nazi Germany discovered during its invation of Russia in 1941, he said.
The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway’s military usefulness is constrained by its proximity to Taiwan, which leaves it vulnerable to Taiwan’s weapons systems, he said.
The AGM-84H stand-off land attack missiles which Taiwan is planning to buy from the US could be launched from F-16s to a range of 270km, while the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System has an effective range of 300km, he said.
“For the PLA, Pingtan Island is not a safe area for troop assembly, logistics or firepower projection,” Hsu said. “This is why it is important for our armed forces to possess long-range firepower capable of strategic deterrence and showing them that we can reach out and touch them.”
PLA preparations to invade Taiwan would almost certainly be detected by the US and Taiwan as soon as they were begun, he said.
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked