When Russian-language speakers want to say that somebody is bluffing, they often use the idiom “China’s final warnings.”
China failed to intimidate US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi into canceling her trip to Taiwan, and its claims that Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft would “accompany” her plane on its approach to the nation, and probably even shoot it down and launch a war, did not materialize.
Beijing’s bluff not only discredited China, it also frustrated Chinese nationalists known as “little pinks.” Pandering to their whims, the Chinese government sought to replicate the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995 and 1996, and set up zones for military drills extending into Taiwan’s territorial waters to practice encircling the nation.
China told its domestic audience that it had successfully blockaded Taiwan, even fabricating images to make little pinks believe that its warships patrolled near the nation’s shores.
Elsewhere in the world, the military drills dominated the headlines, and the G7 foreign ministers issued a joint statement urging China to abide by international, rule of law-based norms.
Although China claimed its missiles had hit all intended targets on the first day of the drills, Japan said that five of them had come down in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which Beijing used as a pretext to cancel its talks with Tokyo at an ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting.
While the Japanese minister of foreign affairs was giving a speech at the event in Cambodia, the top Chinese and Russian diplomats walked out, signaling that Beijing has no intention to resolve the issue with Japan through dialogue. It even denied that the areas where the missiles landed were within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, disputing that the sea border between the two countries is where it is.
Chinese drones recently appeared in Japan’s airspace near Okinawa, causing anxiety. Japan is unlikely to simply “regret” the incidents and let the matter rest. It is foreseeable that such incursions will accelerate Japan’s push for constitutional amendments initiated by former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated last month.
The farce of China’s drills not only caused diplomatic tensions, but also revealed important information about its military capabilities. Seeking to please the little pinks, China not only spent huge resources on the drills, it also enabled the Leshan Radar Station in Hsinchu County to obtain data on its missiles and warships.
It also exposed the strategy China would employ if it were to attack Taiwan, including the major roles of cognitive and information warfare. Soon after Pelosi arrived, screens in Taiwanese convenience stores were hacked and the Web sites of the Ministry of National Defense and other government agencies were targeted with distributed denial of service attacks.
These incidents suggest that if China were to attack, its cyberwarfare might be able to interfere with the release of government information. Taiwan should therefore learn from US and European attitudes toward Sina Weibo and TikTok, and tighten control over the Chinese apps or even ban them.
Pro-unification figures in Taiwan have been questioning why the nation’s military did not intercept Chinese missiles that flew over Taiwan, while at the same time advocating surrender and seeking to diminish the confidence of Taiwanese in their nation’s readiness to defend itself, as well as their own will to contribute to the effort.
Tensions remain high, and it is time for Taiwan to impose freedom of speech restrictions and raise public awareness of national defense.
Hong Tsun-ming, originally from Hong Kong, is a specialist in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party’s international affairs department.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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