Taiwan is doing everything it can to prevent a military conflict with China, including building up asymmetric defense capabilities and fortifying public resilience, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said in a recent interview.
“Everything we are doing is to prevent a conflict from happening, whether it is 2027 or before that or beyond that,” Hsiao told American podcaster Shawn Ryan of the Shawn Ryan Show.
She was referring to a timeline cited by several US military and intelligence officials, who said Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take military action against Taiwan by 2027.
Photo: Screen grab from the Presidential Office’s Flickr page
Faced with China’s continued naval expansion and its globally dominant defense manufacturing capacity, Taiwan is focused on “investing in our own defense in an asymmetric way” to complicate Chinese military calculations and deter an attack, Hsiao said.
With China continuing to lay claim to Taiwan and enforcing that rhetoric through diplomatic, military and economic tools on a global scale, Taiwan needs to promote the idea that retaining the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait is in the best interests of all stakeholders around the world, including China, she said.
In addition to military threats, Taiwan also faces “cognitive warfare, disinformation and efforts to divide our society, weakening our unity and cohesion,” Hsiao said. “We are in a race to make ourselves much more resilient.”
The government is pursuing whole-of-society resilience efforts primarily aimed at equipping people with the ability to protect themselves, which would ease some of the burden on the government, she said.
While Taiwan is used to responding to earthquakes and other natural disasters, it still needs to work on its first-aid training, improve its emergency response capabilities, stockpile critical supplies and prepare shelters, Hsiao said, adding that society must change its perceptions about how to manage emergency response situations.
“Historically, [in] every disaster, [what] we have had is the military supporting civil society. What we have not really experienced is going the other way around — our civil society supporting our defense, our military,” she added.
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