“China is preparing to invade Taiwan,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) said in an exclusive interview with British media channel Sky News for a special report titled, “Is Taiwan ready for a Chinese invasion?” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said today in a statement.
The 25-minute-long special report by Helen Ann-Smith released yesterday saw Sky News travel to Penghu, Taoyuan and Taipei to discuss the possibility of a Chinese invasion and how Taiwan is preparing for an attack.
The film observed emergency response drills, interviewed baseball fans at the Taipei Dome on their views of US President Donald Trump, visited a university lab teaching students to make semiconductors and spoke to Taiwanese veterans at a care home.
Photo: Sky News
The documentary raised issues such as Taiwan’s drone production capacity, standing at 8,000 to 10,000 from April 2024 to April this year, falling short of the 180,000 annual production target set for 2028, plus the increase in Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft entering Taiwan’s de facto air defense identification zone since President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration last year.
Moreover, it noted that, for the first time, the PLA deployed both of its active aircraft carriers into the Western Pacific at the same time this year.
“The population need to not be naive like in the past... China is preparing to invade Taiwan,” Wu said in the interview.
“Taiwan alone, facing China — we will never be ready... it’s not possible, China is so big, so huge,” he added.
“If one day China take[s] Taiwan, of course it will be very bad for Taiwan... maybe we will be destroyed... but the modern world that we are living in now... will also disappear,” Wu said, due to the global demand for Taiwanese semiconductors.
“Americans have also given us a lot when in 1996 we [had] the missile crisis,” Wu said, adding that, now, the US military is trying to maintain regional stability and democracy to protect not only the semiconductor industry, but US-Taiwan national interests.
“Donald Trump certainly knows that without Taiwanese chips, he cannot make America great again,” Wu added.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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