While China might not launch an all-out invasion of Taiwan this year, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could scale up attacks on Taiwan’s outlying islands, the Independent said on Tuesday.
The UK-based newspaper cited the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s latest Worldwide Threat Assessment report, which was released earlier this month.
China possesses a variety of military options to coerce Taiwan, including “seizure of Taiwan’s smaller outlying islands, joint firepower strikes, and a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan,” the US Department of Defense agency said in the report.
Photo courtesy of the Coast Guard Administration
However, “China appears willing to defer seizing Taiwan by force as long as it calculates unification ultimately can be negotiated, the costs of forcing unification continue to outweigh the benefits, and its stated redlines have not been crossed by Taiwan or its partners and allies,” the report said.
“China is likely to continue its campaign of diplomatic, information, military and economic pressure on Taiwan to advance its long-term objective of unification with Taiwan,” it said.
Such strategies would also “deter any move by Taiwan toward independence, and test the United States’ commitment to Taiwan’s defense,” it said.
Political observers have long warned that Kinmen and Matsu are the most vulnerable among Taiwan’s territories, the Independent said.
While Taiwan and the US do not have diplomatic relations, Washington would be expected to respond to any Chinese attack against Taiwan and use Guam as a staging point for such operations, the article said.
“Beijing’s contemporary efforts to annex Kinmen and Matsu blend economic enticements, nonviolent coercion, legal warfare, information operations, infrastructure construction, and miscellaneous ‘gray zone’ lines of effort to manipulate public opinion on the islands and erode Taiwan’s control of its territories,” the Independent quoted an assessment made by the Institute for the Study of War last year.
The Washington-based think tank added that China could “escalate current lines of effort (LOEs) to erode Taiwan’s sovereignty over its outlying territory of Kinmen in a short-of-war coercion campaign to seize control of the island group in the near term.”
In related news, Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) yesterday said that the equipment and identity of 27 Chinese crossing the Taiwan Strait in rubber dinghies over the past two years suggest “a systematic operation.”
Kuan said they originated from 15 provinces in China, including inland regions, with at least one from each province.
“It is difficult to explain this distribution in terms of political, economic and social conditions,” she said.
The government “has not ruled out” that these cases might be part of a systematic operation in China, given the nature of their claims and equipment, she said, adding that prosecutors and the coast guard are investigating.
Precautionary measures must be taken against Chinese “gray zone” tactics, she added.
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