China Has Lost Taiwan, and It Knows It

So it is attacking democracy on the island from within.
By Natasha Kassam

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan and her running mate, William Lai Ching-te, campaigning in Taipei on Nov. 17. Ms. Tsai has vehemently denounced interference from Beijing.

“Not a chance,” the president’s tweet said, in Chinese characters. 

That was the message from Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of Taiwan, on Nov. 5, after the Chinese government announced a string of initiatives to lure Taiwanese companies and residents to the mainland.
“Beijing’s new 26 measures are part of a greater effort to force a ‘one country, two systems’ model on #Taiwan,” Ms. Tsai’s tweet said, referring to the principle according to which Hong Kong — another territory Beijing eventually hopes to fully control — is supposed to be governed for now and its semiautonomy from Beijing guaranteed. 

“I want to be very clear: China’s attempts to influence our elections & push us to accept ‘one country, two systems’ will never succeed.” 

The protesters who have mobilized in Hong Kong for months say, in effect, that the principle is a lie.
In Taiwan, the Chinese government’s objective has long been what it calls “peaceful reunification” — “reunification” even though Taiwan has never been under the jurisdiction or control of the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party. 

To achieve that goal, Beijing has for years tried to simultaneously coax and coerce Taiwan’s adhesion with both the promise of economic benefits and military threats. 

Early this year, Xi Jinping reiterated that “complete reunification” was a “historic task.” 

“We make no promise to renounce the use of force and reserve the option of taking all necessary means,” he added.
Taiwan is gearing up for a presidential election in January. 

On Nov. 17, Ms. Tsai announced that the pro-independence William Lai Ching-te, a former prime minister, would be her running mate. 

On the same day, China sent an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait. (In July, China had released its defense white paper, and it stated, “By sailing ships and flying aircraft around Taiwan, the armed forces send a stern warning to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”) 

Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister, reacted by tweeting: “#PRC intends to intervene in #Taiwan’s elections. Voters won’t be intimidated! They’ll say NO to #China at the ballot box.”
The Chinese government also seems to suspect as much: Even as it holds fast to its usual (ineffectual) strong-arm tactics, it is employing new measures as well. 

It no longer is simply supporting candidates from the Kuomintang, a party that now favors closer ties with Beijing. 

It is also trying to undermine Taiwan’s democratic process itself and sow social divisions on the island.
It seems clear by now that even Beijing-friendly candidates cannot deliver Taiwan to China. 

Only about one in 10 Taiwanese people support unification with China, whether sooner or later, according to a survey by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University in October. Given public opinion, presidential candidates are likely to hurt their chances if they are perceived as being too close to the Chinese government.
Beijing, by flexing its muscle, seems to have succeeded only in pushing the Taiwanese away. 

A series of missile tests by the People’s Liberation Army in the lead-up to Taiwan’s March 1996 presidential election was designed to intimidate voters and turn them away from re-electing the nationalist Lee Teng-hui. 

One of his opponents, Chen Li-an, warned, “If you vote for Lee Teng-hui, you are choosing war.” 

Mr. Lee won comfortably over three other candidates, with 54 percent of the popular vote.
The Chinese authorities also seemed to think that increasing economic interdependence across the Taiwan Strait would be a pathway to unification. 

At some point, the theory went, it would be too costly for Taiwan to unravel economic links.
And yet. 

Trade between China and Taiwan exceeded $181 billion in 2017, up from about $35.5 billion in 1999. 

But even as the two economies grew closer, the number of people who identified as Taiwanese increased: from more than 48 percent to about 60 percent between 2008 and late 2015, during the presidency of Ma Ying-jeou, of the Kuomintang.
The Sunflower Movement of 2014, a series of protests led by a coalition of students and civil-society activists, marked the rejection of close relations with China by Taiwan’s younger generations. So did the election of the pro-sovereignty Ms. Tsai in 2016.
Ms. Tsai’s popularity then slid — mostly because she couldn’t sell significant reforms on pensions and same-sex marriage or make progress on stagnant wage growth and pollution control. 

By the time local elections were held in late 2018, her chances at a second presidential term seemed to be next to nil. 

But now she leads opinion polls.
For her renewed popularity, she can thank, in part, the monthslong protests in Hong Kong. 

Beijing designed the “one country, two systems” model in place in the city also with Taiwan in mind. The idea, long unpopular with many Taiwanese people, seems less credible than ever.
China casts a wide net, and it will persist in pulling its military and economic levers. 

No doubt, too, it will continue to manipulate news coverage to try to buoy Beijing-friendly candidates in the upcoming election. 

But now it is also launching a disinformation campaign to sap Taiwanese’s trust in their institutions and sow discontent among them.
Late last month, Ms. Tsai accused China of “producing fake news and disseminating rumors to deceive and mislead Taiwanese” in hopes of “destroying our democracy.” 

Ms. Tsai herself has struggled to shake off the accusation that she did not earn a doctorate from the London School of Economics, even though the university has confirmed that she was “correctly awarded a Ph.D. in law in 1984.” 

Chinese officials have privately admitted that Russia’s tampering with the United States’ presidential election in 2016 caused them to reconsider ways of meddling with Taiwan’s.
China has also made no secret of its intention to exacerbate social rifts in Taiwan. 

An editorial from April in The Global Times, a Chinese state-owned tabloid, stated: “We don’t need a real war to resolve the Taiwan question. The mainland can adopt various measures to make Taiwan ruled by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) turn into a Lebanon situation which ‘Taiwan independence’ forces cannot afford.” 

Meaning: The Chinese government believes it can pit various ethnic, political and social groups in Taiwan against one another.
China can also be expected to exploit the soft underbelly of Taiwanese politics: patronage networks. Those are less important today than during Taiwan’s authoritarian days, but they continue to allow community leaders, farmers’ associations and even organized-crime figures to buy votes.
Social media platforms are another key battleground: Nearly 90 percent of Taiwan’s population is active on them, and traditional news outlets have been known to republish fake posts without fact-checking. 

According to Reuters, Chinese government agencies paid Taiwanese news outlets to publish pro-Beijing content.
By some accounts, a disinformation campaign conducted by a professional cybergroup from China, which was traced back to the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party, helped the pro-China Han Kuo-yu get elected mayor of the southern city of Kaohsiung: One (false) story claimed that during a debate, Mr. Han’s opponent wore an earpiece feeding him talking points. 

China is trying to erode Taiwan’s body politic from within.
But Taiwan is pushing back. 

Legislators have recently accelerated efforts to pass a law against foreign infiltration and political interference before the election. 

An adviser to a presidential candidate told me this summer in Taipei, “The question for voters this election is: Do you want a quick death or a slow one?” 

Is it, though? 

Despite Beijing’s efforts at sabotage, Taiwan’s democracy is proving well and truly alive.

The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis: The Forgotten Showdown Between China and America

It made Asia what it is today.
By J. Michael Cole

Twenty-one years ago this week, as Taiwanese were readying to hold their country’s first direct presidential election later in March, China flexed its military muscles by holding a series of military exercises and firing missiles within thirty-five miles off the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung, causing a panic in Taiwan and prompted U.S. President William J. Clinton to deploy a carrier battle group to international waters near Taiwan.

The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, as the events came to be known, disrupted naval shipping and commercial air traffic, causing harm to Taiwan’s economy. 

Amid fears of a possible invasion—fuelled by planned People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises simulating an amphibious assault and live-fire exercises near the outlying island of Penghu—Taiwanese scrambled to reserve seats on flights to North America.
In the end, crisis was averted, likely due to the U.S. intervention, and Beijing’s efforts to coerce the Taiwanese backfired: Lee Teng-hui, the candidate from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) whom China suspected had pro-independence inclinations, was elected with a majority instead of the expected mere plurality. 

According to historians, China’s military threat gave Lee a 5% boost in the March 23 election, the first indication, perhaps, that coercion, rather than cow the Taiwanese into submission, was a counterproductive policy.
Besides exacerbating momentum toward a more Taiwan-centric sentiment across the fledging democracy, Beijing’s military maneuvers (which had begun a year prior in response to President Lee’s visit to the U.S.) likely also convinced Washington of the necessity of providing Taiwan with more means to defend itself as part of its policy under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, passed in response to the establishment of official diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
While many historians argue that the mass killings surrounding the 2-28 Incident of 1947 by KMT forces constituted the “birth certificate” of Taiwan as a distinct nation, it could also be argue that the Missile Crisis of 1995–96 represented a breaking point in the Taiwan Strait, when Beijing’s belligerence made it clear it would not countenance the wishes of the Taiwanese to continue down the road of democratization after nearly four decades of authoritarian rule. 

Years before it became fashionable to do so, China’s actions made it clear that the “one country, two systems” framework, formulated by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s to handmaiden the reunification of Hong Kong, Macau and eventually unification with Taiwan—was seriously flawed.
Learning from its overreaction and humbled by the U.S. naval deployment, Beijing did not resort to similar intimidation as Taiwanese continued to exercise their democratic right. 

It even showed self-restraint when, for the first time in 2000, a candidate from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004. 

Beijing’s rhetoric remained harshly opposed to Taiwan independence, but it had learned that coercion by military means was counterproductive. 

Instead, Beijing shifted its strategy, and for the next decade and a half it instead attempted to win the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese through economic interdependence, a process that deepened under President Chen Shui-bian of the DPP and accelerated by leaps and bounds under his successor, Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT (2008–16).
Nevertheless, the injury to Chinese pride in 1996, as well as the display of overwhelming U.S. military capability during the Gulf War of 1991, convinced Beijing of the need to modernize its military. 

The result was an intensive program of double-digit investment, foreign acquisitions (primarily from Russia and the Ukraine) and indigenous resourcing to turn the PLA into a force capable of imposing Beijing’s will within its immediate neighborhood and, eventually, beyond. 

China’s embracing of an anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy, supported by the means to enforce such a plan, was a direct response to the humiliation it suffered in 1996 at the hands of what it regarded as a “foreign intervention.”
Thus, a direct line can be drawn between the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis and China’s current efforts to displace the U.S. as the hegemon in the Asia-Pacific. 

The repercussions of this national trauma reverberate through time and are inarguably part of Beijing’s rationale for creating a new naval architecture all the way to the South China Sea, which it is busy militarizing, and beyond into the West Pacific.
Twenty-one years on, memories of the Crisis—and perhaps the lessons learned from it—appear to have faded. 

Ask ordinary Taiwanese what happened twenty-one years ago this month, and most will be unable to answer. 

For most people in Taiwan, therefore, the reality of military force and its implications are now an abstract concept. 

This partly explains why, despite the existential threat they face, the Taiwanese have not been willing to support spending on national defense that is commensurate with the nature of the external challenge.
On the Chinese side (at least within the elite and the PLA), the humiliation of direct contact with U.S. military may have dissipated, but it hasn’t been completely forgotten and may now serve as justification for the desire to expel the U.S. from the region. 

Moreover, the cultivation of an expansionist nationalism, added to the belief that China has “arrived” and is deserving of respect as a major power, borders dangerously close on hubris, one of the most powerful agents of national amnesia. 

Finally, given the failure of Beijing’s attempt to win over the Taiwanese through economic incentives and cultural propaganda (support for unification has been dropping since the early 1990s and reached an all-time, single-digit low last year), combined with Xi Jinping’s statement to the effect that the Taiwan “issue” cannot be allowed to fester indefinitely, may reinforce the notion in some circles that the only way to resolve the conflict is by use of force, in similar fashion to how Russia handled the Crimea issue.
A wavering commitment to national defense in Taiwan, stemming in part from the forgotten trauma of 1996, added to a resurgent China fixated on exorcising past humiliations and doubt over continued U.S. commitment to security and stability in the Asia Pacific, is a recipe for trouble.
Furthermore, China’s ability to coerce Taiwan today is orders of magnitude greater than it was twenty-one years ago. 

The Second Artillery Corps, the branch of the Chinese military that controls the conventional and nuclear missile arsenal, has made leaps and bounds both numerically and qualitatively; thus, not only has the number of missiles targeting Taiwan increased (according to estimates, the total number is now 1,500 ballistic missiles, plus a few hundred cruise missiles), but the destructiveness and accuracy of those missiles has also improved markedly with the decommissioning of old DF-11s and their replacement with more precise ones, as well as the addition of longer-range DF-15s and 16s. 

China’s ability to zero down on targets in and around Taiwan has also improved dramatically thanks to much better intelligence, such as GPS and aerial/orbital surveillance. 

Additionally, the number of platforms from which the PLA can launch attacks against Taiwan has increased and now includes the full spectrum of land, air and sea. 

And it is now multidirectional, as the PLA Navy (PLAN) and PLA Air Force (PLAAF) have now demonstrated their ability to operate in parts of the West Pacific and therefore on the Eastern side of Taiwan. 

The December 2016 sortie of China’s first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, which broke through the “first island chain” and looped around Taiwan before transiting the Taiwan Strait on its return home, makes it clear that naval and aerial attacks against the island-nation will no longer originate from a single direction—i.e., the Chinese mainland. 

Realizing this, Taiwan’s military recently deployed U.S.-made PAC-3 units in Hualien and Taitung to defend eastern parts of the country.
In light of the new nature of the threat and a rapidly changing security environment in the Asia-Pacific, Taiwanese authorities should implement some measures to ensure preparedness. 

Among other things, it should use history so that the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and the lessons learned from it, aren’t forgotten. 

While it may seem like a long time ago, there is nevertheless a precedent for use of force by the PLA against Taiwan, and the quiet period since 1996 does not signify that Beijing has shelved that option. Although such a scenario arguably constitutes an extreme, military coercion very much remains part of China’s strategy, and the current conditions could make their use seem more appealing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese ultranationalists. 

By keeping memories of the 1995-96 Missile Crisis alive with the public, Taiwanese authorities would diminish the likelihood of panic, overreaction—and perhaps surrender—should the PLA once again be called upon to intimidate Taiwan.
Besides China’s growing missile arsenal, which it should be stated does not only target Taiwan, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs has also awakened the region to the threat. 

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines are now all potential targets to missile attack by an adversary. 

Earlier this week, Pyongyang test-fired four ballistic missiles, ostensibly as part of a simulated attack on U.S. military bases in Japan. 

Meanwhile, in response to the threat from the North, South Korea has agreed to the deployment of a U.S.-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on its territory, with the first units arriving earlier this week. 

Beijing, which sees a potential use of the system to counter its own missile force (including the possibility that the radar systems could be used to monitor the Chinese military), has reacted with consternation and launched a series of punitive measures against South Korea.
For its part, Japan is a target of both North Korean missiles and, due to its longstanding disputes with China over history and territory in the East China Sea, to PLA attacks. 

U.S. military bases across Japan, which would play a crucial role in contingencies in both the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait, would be prime targets during the initial phase of hostilities, particularly if China decided to launch major military operations against Taiwan. 

Given the threat it faces on two fronts, Japan, working in conjunction with the U.S. military, has had every incentive to take early warning, tracking, air defense and mitigation seriously. 

Pyongyang’s missile tests, while unsettling, have nevertheless contributing to better preparedness by the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) and U.S. military forces deployed in the region.
Should tensions between China and North Korea on one side and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the U.S. on the other continue to increase—much of this contingent on the kind of policies the Donald J. Trump administration adopts for the region—the latter group may feel compelled to increase intelligence sharing on the missile threat emanating from China and North Korea. 

U.S. satellite and aerial surveillance, combined with South Korea’s early warning systems (including the X-band AN/TPY-2 radar guiding the THAAD system), Japan’s EW systems and Taiwan’s long-range early-warning radar on Leshan—a modernized version of the AN/FPS-115 Pave Paws which can track any air-breathing target 4,000 km inside China—could form the basis of a nascent missile tracking/intercept quadrumvirate within the region.
As one of the corners of that square and due to its proximity to China, Taiwan should do its utmost to ensure it has a seat at the table, both as a provider and consumer of such critical real-time EW information. 

Given the affinity between Japan and Taiwan for historical reasons, Japanese jitters at the thought of a PLA presence in Taiwan, and the greater role the U.S. is expected to give Tokyo in a transforming regional security architecture, the time might be ripe for closer security cooperation between Tokyo and Taipei, something which may already have begun since the election of the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen to the presidency in 2016.
Buttressing the desire to share intelligence (and perhaps technology), moreover, is the fact that all four countries are U.S. allies/partners and democracies aligned against two revisionist, authoritarian, and destabilizing regimes. 

Thus, despite the growing threat it faces from an increasingly powerful China and the high uncertainty surrounding the future of the region, circumstances—particularly the potential for Beijing to alienate Seoul should the relationship continue to sour—could in fact turn more favorable for Taiwan, thus creating an opportunity to play a greater role in regional security.

Sina Delenda Est

Why China Fears America's Aircraft Carriers
By Kyle Mizokami

More than twenty years ago, a military confrontation in East Asia pushed the United States and China uncomfortably close to conflict. 

Largely unknown in America, the event made a lasting impression on China, especially Chinese military planners. 

The Third Taiwan Crisis, as historians call it, was China’s introduction to the power and flexibility of the aircraft carrier, something it obsesses about to this day.
The crisis began in 1995. 

Taiwan’s first-ever democratic elections for president were set for 1996, a major event that Beijing naturally opposed. 

The sitting president, Lee Teng-hui of the Kuomintang party, was invited to the United States to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University. 

Lee was already disliked by Beijing for his emphasis on “Taiwanization,” which favored home rule and established a separate Taiwanese identity away from mainland China. 

Now he was being asked to speak at Cornell on Taiwan’s democratization, and Beijing was furious.
The Clinton administration was reluctant to grant Lee a visa—he had been denied one for a similar talk at Cornell the year before—but near-unanimous support from Congress forced the White House’s hand. 

Lee was granted a visa and visited Cornell in June. 

The Xinhua state news agency warned, “The issue of Taiwan is as explosive as a barrel of gunpowder. It is extremely dangerous to warm it up, no matter whether the warming is done by the United States or by Lee Teng-hui. This wanton wound inflicted upon China will help the Chinese people more clearly realize what kind of a country the United States is.”
In August 1995, China announced a series of missiles exercises in the East China Sea. 

Although the exercises weren’t unusual, their announcement was, and there was speculation that this was the beginning of an intimidation campaign by China, both as retaliation against the Cornell visit and intimidation of Taiwan’s electorate ahead of the next year’s elections. 

The exercises involved the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Artillery Corps (now the PLA Rocket Forces) and the redeployment of Chinese F-7 fighters (China’s version of the MiG-21 Fishbed fighter) 250 miles from Taiwan. 

Also, in a move that would sound very familiar in 2017, up to one hundred Chinese civilian fishing boats entered territorial waters around the Taiwanese island of Matsu, just off the coast of the mainland.
According to Globalsecurity.org, redeployments of Chinese long-range missile forces continued into 1996, and the Chinese military actually prepared for military action. 

China drew up contingency plans for thirty days of missile strikes against Taiwan, one strike a day, shortly after the March 1996 presidential elections. 

These strikes were not carried out, but preparations were likely detected by U.S. intelligence.
In March 1996, China announced its fourth major military exercises since the Cornell visit. 

The country’s military announced a series of missile test zones off the Chinese coastline, which also put the missiles in the approximate direction of Taiwan. 

In reality, China fired three missiles, two of which splashed down just thirty miles from the Taiwanese capital of Taipei and one of which splashed down thirty-five miles from Kaohsiung. Together, the two cities handled most of the country’s commercial shipping traffic. 

For an export-driven country like Taiwan, the missile launches seemed like an ominous shot across the country’s economic bow.
American forces were already operating in the area. 

The USS Bunker Hill, a Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser, was stationed off southern Taiwan to monitor Chinese missile tests with its SPY-1 radar system. 

The Japan-based USS Independence, along with the destroyers Hewitt and O’Brien and frigate McClusky, took up position on the eastern side of the island.
After the missile tests, the carrier USS Nimitz left the Persian Gulf region and raced back to the western Pacific. 

This was an even more powerful carrier battle group, consisting of the Aegis cruiser Port Royal, guided missile destroyers Oldendorf and Callaghan (which would later be transferred to the Taiwanese Navy), guided missile frigate USS Ford, and nuclear attack submarine USS Portsmouth. Nimitz and its escorts took up station in the Philippine Sea, ready to assist Independence. 

Contrary to popular belief, neither carrier actually entered the Taiwan Strait.
The People’s Liberation Army, unable to do anything about the American aircraft carriers, was utterly humiliated. 

China, which was just beginning to show the consequences of rapid economic expansion, still did not have a military capable of posing a credible threat to American ships just a short distance from of its coastline.
While we might never know the discussions that later took place, we know what has happened since. Just two years later a Chinese businessman purchased the hulk of the unfinished Russian aircraft carrier Riga, with the stated intention of turning it into a resort and casino. 

We know this ship today as China’s first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, after it was transferred to the PLA Navy and underwent a fifteen-year refurbishment. 

At least one other carrier is under construction, and the ultimate goal may be as many as five Chinese carriers.
At the same time, the Second Artillery Corps leveraged its expertise in long-range rockets to create the DF-21D antiship ballistic missile. 

The DF-21 has obvious applications against large capital ships, such as aircraft carriers, and in a future crisis could force the U.S. Navy to operate eight to nine hundred miles off Taiwan and the rest of the so-called “First Island Chain.”
The Third Taiwan Crisis was a brutal lesson for a China that had long prepared to fight wars inside of its own borders. 

Still, the PLA Navy deserves credit for learning from the incident and now, twenty-two years later, it is quite possible that China could seriously damage or even sink an American carrier. 

Also unlike the United States, China is in the unique position of both seeing the value of carriers and building its own fleet while at the same time devoting a lot of time and resources to the subject of sinking them. 

The United States may soon find itself in the same position.