China is once again putting its military might on display in order to threaten Taiwan. Hong Kong media outlets reported Tuesday that China would hold military exercises on Dongshan Island off Fujian Province. According to the reports, the exercises would involve large numbers of personnel, aircraft and submarines.
The purpose of making threats is to frighten one's opponent and in so doing to hijack that opponent's freedom to think and act. As long as no attack actually materializes, the threat of attack always remains. Former president Lee Teng-hui (
Lee, in his straightforward way, revealed what lies at the heart of China's military threats. China doesn't have to attack; by making occasional threats, it can always frighten some Taiwanese, ensuring that they don't dare contravene China's wishes.
But given the sensitivity and fragility of the international economic environment, China does not really need to invade Taiwan. It can hurt Taiwan more than enough by test-firing the occasional missile and complicating Taiwan's international relations -- for this is sufficient to cause investors to pull out of Taiwan, the stock market to crash, Taiwanese society to be disrupted and people to leave the country.
Since China stopped shelling Kinmen in the 1970s, Chinese threats have caused Taiwan's economic and political reform to make progress very slowly. Only US promises of military assistance have been able to relax the political and economic situation in Taiwan.
But China's threat-making has been constant, though new pretexts are sometimes provided for it. During the Lee era, China threatened Taiwan time and again, calling Lee a traitor and saying that he would be swept into the dustbin of history. Now that President Chen Shui-bian (
We don't know if the Chinese people should be proud or sorry that China, a country claiming to have a glorious 5,000 year-old culture, has become the nightmare of Taiwan, a country sharing its culture.
In short, it is difficult to reason with China's leaders -- so Taiwan must help itself.
Only by improving its military preparedness will Taiwan have any bargaining chips in cross-strait negotiations. Only by tightening military exchanges with the US and Japan and upgrading the nation's military hardware will Taiwan gain an effective deterrent against rash Chinese action.
China's military expenditures have increased over the years while those of Taiwan have gradually declined. To improve that nation's anti-missile equipment and strengthen its naval capability, yesterday the Cabinet finally proposed a NT$610.8 billion (US$17.9 billion) special budget to buy modern weapons from the US. Cabinet spokesman Chen Chi-mai (
Security across the Taiwan Strait is crucial not only to the development of Taiwan's politics and economy but also to regional peace in Asia. Once disorder occurs in Taiwan, it may damage the political and economic stability of neighboring countries -- such as Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries. In particular, as China's political and economic power increases, its military expansion threatens the military balance in East Asia.
The Chinese military expansion is indeed worrisome. No wonder US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher expressed his concern during a press briefing on Tuesday, saying that the US sees "the [Chinese] military buildup and missile deployments as destabilizing."
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
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If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
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