Taiwan is not seeking war with Beijing, and its policy is to build up a defensive, multilevel deterrence capability to make it harder for China to capture the nation, Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said yesterday.
Taiwan has in the past few years faced a stepped-up military and political pressure campaign from Beijing.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Sunday said that China views the annexation and “elimination” of Taiwan as its great national cause, telling military cadets not to give in to the defeatism of “the first battle is the last battle,” a theory that Taiwan could collapse as soon as China launched an attack.
Photo: Reuters
Asked at the Legislative Yuan by reporters how long Taiwan could hold out without US support in the event of a Chinese attack, Koo said that was not the point of their strategy.
“It’s not an issue of how long we can last. Our strategy, our hypothesis, is asymmetric warfare to build our multi-domain deterrence, and during this process to weaken” China’s ability to invade, he said.
As part of ongoing military reforms, Taiwan is promoting the idea of “asymmetric warfare,” to make its forces, which are much smaller than China’s, more mobile and harder to attack, with, for example, vehicle-mounted missiles and drones.
China says Lai is a “dangerous separatist” who risks conflict by advocating Taiwanese independence. Lai says only Taiwanese can decide their future, and has repeatedly offered talks with Beijing, but been rebuffed.
Koo said it was China who is the “troublemaker” and provoker of tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
“We have never sought war. We are very clear that our entire strategy is defensive operations,” he said.
US President Joe Biden has upset the Chinese government with comments that appeared to suggest the US would defend Taiwan if it were attacked, a deviation from a long-held position of “strategic ambiguity.”
Koo said the whole point of Washington’s strategic ambiguity was to complicate Beijing’s plans for any invasion of Taiwan.
“They will never be able to rule out the possibility of a US military intervention,” he said.
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