While Chinese military aircraft have been circling Taiwan for a long time, they are now far more intense and threatening than ever before. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense issued a press release on Wednesday saying that in the upcoming 2020, “communist aircraft persistently provoked and intruded into our southwestern airspace with nearly 380 sorties annually.”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry’s 2017 defense report said that during President Tsai Ing-wen’s first term, China sent military aircraft to harass Taiwan a total of just 26 times in the nearly year and a half from August 2016 to December 2017, and that a Taiwan military study said the purpose of the flights around Taiwan at the time was mainly to “swear by the one-China principle “. By contrast, China has sent military aircraft to attack Taiwan almost daily since September, flying close to Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and often even leaping over the sensitive center line of the strait, often threatening to trigger a larger conflict.
According to the Voice of America, a total of 138 Chinese military aircraft have entered the airspace near Taiwan from September 17 to date, according to information made public on the official website of Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense. On Sept. 19, during U.S. Under Secretary of State Keith Krach’s visit to Taiwan, China flew as many as 19 military sorties in one day to harass Taiwan.
In a review of this year’s defense administration, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday that in response to China’s provocations, the ministry “proactively disseminated information on the activities of the Communist forces to the public (including international, bilingual, and English)” through its global information network and official Twitter feed, not only to let the nation know that the national army can accurately monitor the Communist forces’ movements, but also “to make the international community aware of the Chinese Communist Party’s provocative behavior that undermines the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
On the other hand, however, military observers have noted that while the danger of Chinese military provocations has risen significantly, the provocations have attracted less media attention because Chinese military aircraft report to the airspace in the Taiwan Strait almost daily. Oriana Mastro, a China military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said this phenomenon is particularly worrisome.
It’s problematic because it happens every day, so maybe it’s not news,” she told the Voice of America. It’s problematic because first of all, China can use it to increase its training, which really helps increase its military power. At the same time, they try to normalize and normalize military provocations so that they are something that doesn’t warrant any national response.”
A study on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry website earlier this month noted that on March 31, 2019, Chinese warplanes intentionally flew over the center line of the strait for the first time since 1999, an event that was reported in the media at the time as the most serious provocation in the 21st century.
The threat posed by these regular provocations is far more serious than before, Mei Huilin said. Beijing is losing its patience, she said, and for the first time they are realizing that they have the option of using military force against Taiwan, an option the Chinese military is employing with great confidence.
Normalizing the use of military force to promote unification
For more than two decades since the late 1990s, Beijing had harbored the illusion of peaceful reunification, occasionally introducing various preferential policies toward Taiwan while not promising to give up force, but in recent times there have been increasing signs that officials have realized that the prospects for peaceful reunification may be largely lost.
In a recent interview with Chinese media, Wang Zaixi, former deputy director of the Chinese State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said there is a third path available between peaceful reunification and armed reunification, which is to “promote reunification by force” and to “bring the troops to the city” in an attempt to “give up the army without fighting.” This would minimize casualties and shrink the cost, according to Wang Zaixi.
Analysts point out that between the hopelessness of peace unification and the too great cost of armed unification, China has now chosen to put its troops under the city, with its huge military power relative to Taiwan wanting to crush and drag down Taiwan with regular military exercises and military aircraft and warship cruises.
Because of the high asymmetry of military resources between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, China’s normalized disturbance of Taiwan will consume a great deal of Taiwan’s limited defense resources. According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Defense, China has one of the largest air forces in Asia and the third largest in the world. In its 2020 Report to Congress on Developments in China’s Military and Security Posture, the Department of Defense said that China’s air force has more than 2,500 aircraft, including about 2,000 fighter jets. By comparison, China’s official China Central Television had said in a report last month that the Taiwanese Air Force currently has fewer than 400 fighters, including 25 F-5s and 142 F-16s.
A report by the Federation of American Scientists estimated that Taiwan has only 289 fighter jets, and if China continues to harass Taiwan, it will likely be unable to cope in the medium and long term.
In a report earlier this month, Reuters said that normalization is one of the means of China’s “gray-zone warfare” against Taiwan, which aims to exhaust and subdue Taiwan. Taiwan’s former chief of staff Lee Hee-Ming called the tactic “super effective. He told Reuters, “You say the garden is yours, but in fact your neighbors are staying in the garden and they are declaring that it is theirs, and the garden is just one step away from your house.”
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday that in light of the provocations by Chinese military aircraft, Taiwan’s military is now standing by “day and night, regardless of weekdays or holidays” to monitor and properly respond to the situation.
On the other hand, some analysts have pointed out that while the regular routine patrols by Chinese military aircraft can somehow reduce media attention, this approach will not bring Taiwan to its knees. Taiwan’s Defense Security Research Institute Director of the Institute of Cyber Warfare and Information Security Zeng Yishuo said Taiwan society is also well prepared for China’s intentions and for the conflicts that may arise as a result. We are also a think tank that belongs to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, so we will naturally make the worst assumptions, the worst scenarios,” Tseng said. We have already made it clear from our side that we will not fire the first shot. Taiwan is a democratic and pluralistic society, and the public has considerable understanding and awareness. What Beijing is doing in this regard is of course trying to engage in a war of attrition, asymmetric warfare against Taiwan with superior resources, and Taiwan will do it in a smart and cautious way, in an open and transparent way so that the whole society has a full understanding.”
Craig Singleton, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, said China’s portrayal of these military operations as normal training and normalizing them may temporarily avoid some of the backlash from international public opinion, but that doesn’t make Beijing’s strategy a success.
All this military aircraft disturbance and military pressure has done nothing to stop the growing cooperation between the United States and Taiwan, so in some ways you could say that this aggressive pressure has been unsuccessful in stopping the United States, or even in reinforcing Chinese superiority,” Singleton said in an interview with Voice of America. “
In the long run, he said, China’s regular provocations will only bring its regional neighbors closer to the United States.
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