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BANGKOK (AP) – After Beijing sent a record number of military planes to harass Taiwan during the Chinese National Day, the saber rattling has weakened, but tensions remain high, with the rhetoric and reasoning behind the exercises unchanged.
Experts agree that direct conflict is currently unlikely, but as the future of self-governing Taiwan turns increasingly into a powder keg, a mishap or misjudgment could lead to confrontation while Chinese and American ambitions are at odds.
China is trying to regain control of the strategically and symbolically important island, and the US sees Taiwan in the context of wider Chinese challenges.
“From a US perspective, the concept of a great power rivalry with China has put this back on the agenda,” said Henry Boyd, a UK-based defense analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“The need to stand up to China is a powerful motivator that it would also be viewed as a betrayal of American national interests not to take up this fight.”
China claims Taiwan for itself, and control of the island is an important part of Beijing’s political and military thinking. Head of State Xi Jinping emphasized again at the weekend: “The reunification of the nation must and will definitely be achieved” – a goal that has become more realistic due to massive improvements in the Chinese armed forces over the past two decades.
In response, the US has increased its support for Taiwan with a focus on the Indo-Pacific region. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday that US support for Taiwan was “rock solid” and said, “We have also made it very clear that we are committed to deepening our relations with Taiwan.”
Washington’s longstanding policy has been to provide political and military support to Taiwan without making explicit promises to defend it from Chinese attack.
The two sides came perhaps closest in 1996, when China, angry at what it saw as increasing American support for Taiwan, decided to flex its muscles with exercises involving launching missiles into waters about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Taiwan Coast ahead of Taiwan’s first presidential election.
The US responded with its own show of force and sent two aircraft carrier groups into the region. At the time, China had no aircraft carriers and little resources to threaten American ships, and it gave way.
Hit by the episode, China began a massive overhaul of its military, and 25 years later it made significant improvements to missile defense that could easily strike back and equipped or built its own aircraft carriers.
The latest Department of Defense report to Congress found that in 2000 it classified China’s armed forces as “a sizeable but mostly archaic military,” but that it is now a rival that the American military already has in a number of areas, including of shipbuilding, where it now has the largest navy in the world.
Counting ships isn’t the best way to compare capabilities – the U.S. Navy, for example, has 11 aircraft carriers versus China’s two – but in the event of a conflict over Taiwan, China could, and has, deployed almost all of its naval forces land-based anti-ship missiles to complement the battle, said Boyd, a co-author of the IISS’s annual military record of the global armed forces.
“China’s concept of operations with Taiwan is that if it can delay the US presence in combat or limit the number of its forces in combat because we are able to hold their assets at some risk, You can defeat the Taiwanese before the Americans show up with enough force to do anything about it, ”he said.
Taiwan’s own strategy is the mirror image – delaying China long enough for the US and its allies to emerge with force. It has significant armed forces of its own and the advantage of fighting on its home territory. A recent strategy paper also points to the need for asymmetrical measures, which could include, for example, rocket attacks on ammunition from mainland China or fuel depots.
The Taiwan Defense Ministry’s assessment of China’s capabilities, submitted to Parliament in August and obtained by The Associated Press, said China is already able to seal Taiwan’s ports and airports but is currently lacking transportation and logistics support for them large joint landing operations has been improving day by day.
In a new strategic guideline last week, US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro described China as the “most important” long-term challenge.
“For the first time in at least a generation we have a strategic competitor who has naval capabilities to rival ours and who is trying to use his powers aggressively to challenge US principles, partnerships and prosperity,” it says in the newspaper.
China sent a record 149 military aircraft southwest of Taiwan in attack group formations on its National Day weekend earlier this month – in international airspace but into the island’s buffer zone, causing Taiwan to thwart its defenses.
On Monday, China announced it had beach landing and assault drills in the mainland province just across from Taiwan.
Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Bureau of the mainland government, said the measures were necessary and said they were provoked on Wednesday by “Taiwan independence forces” who collapsed with “external forces”.
“With every step, the Chinese are trying to change the status quo and normalize the situation through this slicing of salami,” said Hoo Tiang Boon, coordinator of the China program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “They know there is nothing Taiwan can do about it, and there is a risk of misjudgments or mishaps.”
Taiwan and China split in 1949 amid civil war when the Chiang Kai-shek nationalists fled to the island when Mao Zedong’s communists came to power.
In a 2019 White Paper on Defense, Beijing said it was in favor of “peaceful reunification of the country” – a phrase repeated by Xi over the weekend – but also unequivocally in its goals.
“China must and will be reunified,” says the newspaper. “We do not promise to renounce the use of force and reserve the right to take all necessary measures.”
The Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is now calling for more global support and writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine: “If Taiwan should fall, the consequences would be catastrophic for regional peace and the democratic alliance system.” . “
“Failure to defend Taiwan would not only be catastrophic for Taiwanese people,” she wrote. “It would overturn a security architecture that has enabled peace and exceptional economic development in the region for seven decades.”
US law requires it to help Taiwan maintain its defensive capabilities and treat threats to the island as “serious concerns”.
Washington recently acknowledged that US special forces are in training capacity on the island and is stepping up multinational maneuvers in the region as part of a stated commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. This included an exercise involving 17 ships from six navies – the US, UK, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand off the Japanese island of Okinawa earlier this month.
The so-called Quad Group of Nations – the US, Australia, India and Japan – completed joint exercises in the Bay of Bengal on Thursday, which, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry, demonstrated their determination to “fundamental values such as democracy and the rule of law.”
Washington signed a contract with Britain last month to supply Australia with nuclear submarines, which China said would “seriously damage peace and stability in the region.”
“The Americans are trying to bring the Allies together on a unified front,” said Hoo. “There is a growing internationalization of the Taiwan question.”
At the moment, the armed forces on both sides do not feel fully prepared for a conflict over Taiwan, but in the end it may not be their decision, Boyd said.
“It won’t be a military matter,” he said. “It will be up to the politicians.”
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Associated Press authors Matthew Lee in Washington and Huizhong Wu in Taipei, Taiwan contributed to this report.
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