Recently, international public opinion has focused on the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party may “attack Taiwan soon”. But the Financial Times of London reported that the “attack on Taiwan in six years” was based on a misinterpretation of a Chinese Communist Party document. The paper also warned that overplaying the war and creating fear could lead to falling into the trap of the CCP’s “gray zone tactics.
The Financial Times reported on May 5 that recent warnings of a possible war in the Taiwan Strait have reached a fever pitch. Philip Davidson, the immediate past commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, believes the Chinese Communist Party could attack Taiwan “within the next six years,” while the British weekly The Economist says Taiwan has become “the most dangerous place in the world.
The newspaper said most of these analyses came from a misinterpretation of a Chinese Communist Party document. According to U.S. defense officials, a key reason for Davidson’s “six-year” prediction is that the Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum communiqué last October called for “ensuring that the 100-year goal of building the military is achieved by 2027. A U.S. defense official called this a “mid-term milestone” for the modernization of the Communist Party’s military, “eight years faster than 2035.
Previously, the Communist Party had set the goal of achieving so-called “military modernization” by 2035 and transforming into a “world-class” military by 2049.
The year 2017 marks what the Chinese Communist Party calls the “centennial of the founding of the military. Meia Nouwens, a senior researcher on China defense policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a British think tank, said the Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum communiqué mentions “accelerating the process of military modernization,” which is just one of the many statements the Communist Party and its military documents almost always make. It does not mean that “military modernization” is to be achieved ahead of schedule by 2027.
Taylor Fravel, a China foreign and security policy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also noted that the Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum communiqué still makes numerous references to the 2035 and 2049 targets, indicating that these two timelines have not changed.
Wen also refuted the claim that Beijing is “increasingly confident in attacking Taiwan,” saying that the CCP is only “confident that it can send a large number of modern warships,” but that “how to fight is much more complicated. “The report said it was not meant to downplay the fact that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been able to use its own technology to attack Taiwan.
The report says it does not intend to downplay the military power of the Chinese Communist Party or the military threat to Taiwan, but in fact, the Chinese Communist Party has been stepping up its military harassment and pressure on Taiwan, and its intention is more to use the so-called “gray zone tactics” to force Taiwan into submission than to move toward war. If the outside world keeps creating fears of war in the Taiwan Strait, it will fall into the CCP’s trap.
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