“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.
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