China’s “Joint Sword-2024B” military exercises around Taiwan last week have sparked concerns in Taipei and allied capitals that Beijing’s risk tolerance is increasing, and rather than prioritizing efforts toward “peaceful unification,” it is ramping up efforts to bring about unification by force, whether that be a military quarantine, blockade or full-scale invasion.
Catherine Lila Chou (周怡齡) and Mark Harrison are right in their recent book Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order that the nature of Beijing’s one-party political system, in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is always right, means Taiwanese identity is explained away as being the product of “secessionist” or “foreign” forces, which precludes a serious reckoning with how its aggressive actions are counterproductive to its desired outcome.
“Beijing is thus locked into a cycle of tactical escalation, continuously increasing military and diplomatic pressure… which only strengthens Taiwanese resolve,” they write, leading “Beijing to conclude that even more pressure is needed.”
Beijing appears to be locked into a spiral of tactical escalation, and there are real concerns that China’s Central Military Commission, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are driving a subordination of economic and diplomatic policy to military objectives, trading short-term “tactical wins” over more sustainable long-term goals, reminiscent of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Prussian general staff before World War I.
Beijing’s growing appetite for risk is why international analysts believe the military should prioritize preparations to deter and, if necessary, defeat an invasion. Complicating matters is that Beijing’s symmetric “gray zone” air and sea incursions are designed to prevent the military from diverting resources to building up its asymmetric capabilities, such as with smaller and more dynamic weapons that are hard to destroy and crucial to fighting a full-scale invasion.
However, while Beijing is clearly becoming more aggressive, posing asymmetric and symmetric challenges to Taiwan’s military forces, which should not be minimized and need the full support of President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration to maintain security and morale, Beijing is still a long way from being capable of mounting a full-scale invasion, giving Taiwan time to prepare and boost its capabilities to deter an attack.
Militarily, the PLA is inexperienced, having not fought a war since 1978, and Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine has “likely induce[d] greater caution” about the costs of the use of force, PLA analyst Taylor Fravel said.
With recurring corruption cases in the PLA, it will likely still take a while before Xi would trust his forces to pull it off.
Moreover, Beijing’s economy is in poor shape and beset by structural headwinds associated with weak consumer demand and deleveraging of the property sector. As Financial Times economist Martin Wolf said recently, the longer it takes China to tackle these problems, the more likely it is to enter into a Japan-style property crash deflationary spiral, which took Tokyo three decades to get out of.
Not only could an invasion end in the PLA’s defeat, but if launched before the CCP tackles its economic challenges, could destroy China’s economic rise, ushering in decades of stagnation.
This means Taiwan still has time to boost its deterrence fundamentals, such as training and command reforms, which Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) is working on, and the nation’s whole-of-society preparedness, launched by Lai in June.
Beijing’s latest exercises are intended to intimidate and bully, but do not presage an immediate attack. By working closely with the US and other allies to boost their capabilities, Taiwan and the democratic world could ensure that even after Beijing’s military and economic reforms, Xi would still feel the gamble is not worth the risk.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
RSS