The US should respond more firmly to China’s increasing “gray zone” tactics near Taiwan to help the country maintain the “status quo” in the region, academics attending a forum hosted by The Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia, said on Monday.
The forum was titled “Under Pressure: China’s Coercive Campaign in the Taiwan Strait.”
Since September 2020, the frequency, scale, diversity and complexity of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) activity near Taiwan have all increased, said Ben Lewis, an independent defense analyst based in Washington who specializes in Chinese military development and Taiwanese security issues.
Photo: CNA
He is also a cofounder of PLATracker, a Web site dedicated to providing data-driven analysis of Chinese military activity and regional security developments in Asia.
“The PLA is transitioning from kind of having a presence to making the presence mean something by training,” Lewis said.
First and foremost this gives the PLA a chance to practice, he said, adding that it is practicing joint air operations and bringing in new air capabilities.
Second, it puts a strain on Taiwan’s defenses, forcing it to scramble its jets in response when needed, Lewis said.
It is also a tool for Beijing to signal its displeasure with geopolitical developments involving Taiwan, he added.
China is trying to normalize these activities to ensure the PLA’s presence is not seen as provocative, Lewis said.
“They’ve been very successful in making it so that the press doesn’t comment on 15 aircraft crossing the medium line,” he said. “You have to kind of hit 25 or 30 now for it to hit the wires.”
“To assert a de facto control over the airspace around Taiwan, they go up to the contiguous zone” and have naval ships around the nation now on a near permanent basis, he said.
Subsequently, “the PLA is always around and it doesn’t really catch people’s eyes as much as it used to,” Lewis said.
Regarding law enforcement operations around Kinmen County, Beijing stated that its goal was to normalize the presence of the China Coast Guard in prohibited waters off Kinmen, he said.
The Ministry of National Defense should improve its information sharing practices regarding Beijing’s moves, which would also give people more confidence in Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, Lewis said.
The cross-strait “status quo” is being changed on a daily basis, but Washington’s support for the “status quo” is “inadequate,” he said.
Against such a backdrop, the US would conduct law-enforcement drills with Taiwan’s coast guard, Lewis said.
It is a fairly non provocative way to not only show support, but also learn about what China is doing, he said.
The US needs to more often and more harshly publicly condemn the PLA’s destabilizing activities, asserting that the Taiwan Relations Act does apply to non-kinetic changes to the “status quo,” he said.
Dan Blumenthal, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the US and Taiwan’s coast guard should hold joint law-enforcement drills.
Under the International Civil Aviation Organization, the US and its partners should team up to deter China’s efforts to normalize intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, he said.
The US and the international community should also say something about Taiwan’s maritime rights under international law, if China claims that Taiwan does not have normal rights under international law, Blumenthal said.
Project 2049 Institute chairman Randall Schriver, former US assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said some people call the Chinese tendency toward incrementalism “salami slicing.”
“But no strong response, robust response in the gray zone and to coercive activities will lead to pocketing of those gains as new normals,” he said.
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