Dominic Nicholls
The ripples from the war in Ukraine have spread far and wide; they’ve even reached the South China Sea - so it’s time to talk about Taiwan.
According to diplomatic sources in the UK, Beijing believes there is a 48-hour window in which it can attack Taiwan before any international consensus forms.
In that time Chinese forces would need to get across the Taiwan Strait, onto the land and cut off the political and military leadership in Taiwan.
That’s a tall order.
China wants Taiwan to be reunified with the mainland, and it is said that no Chinese premier would be able to stay in position if they renounced their claim to Taiwan.
So Xi Jinping is on a one-way journey - there’s no status quo here. He’s not going to allow Taiwan to exist as an independent sovereign state and doesn’t hide his view that Taipei will unify with the communist mainland.
It’s just a question of when, not if. So when can we expect a confrontation?
Well, President Xi has made no bones about saying that 2027 is the date that he wants the Chinese army to be ‘ready’ to take back Taiwan. Now, that doesn’t mean that they will invade in 2027, but certainly implies a significant milestone.
Ely Ratner, the senior Pentagon official in charge of the Indo-Pacific region, has said he doesn’t expect anything to happen before the end of the decade.
There is just too much diplomatic turbulence going on at the moment and something else on top of that would be a huge shock to the diplomatic system; and with China yet to see the full results of the war in Ukraine, their confidence in being able to act in the next few years remains unclear.
We do know that the Chinese military has been expanding at a rapid rate. The Chief of Britain’s Defence Staff says that their navy is increasing by the size of the entire Royal Navy every four years. The same thing is happening in areas of space, cyber, air and land.
The lynchpin here is that the Chinese military is untested. It hasn’t fought a war since 1979 when it invaded Vietnam. It is unknown how they will operate on day one of the shooting match - we don’t know if the organisation is very top-down or if the lower level commanders are able to make decisions for themselves when the shooting match starts.
To take the islands would be a tough military operation in and of itself - the island of Formosa, where the capital Taipei stands, lies 70 miles across the Taiwan Strait. China will have seen how Russia, which has a land border with Ukraine, got into all sorts of trouble on launching their invasion.
The most likely scenario for an attack would start with a massive cyber attack to paralyse Taiwan’s decision-making bodies - both military and political - and then a lightning strike to get across the strait and onto the island.
But an amphibious assault is a very tricky operation. First of all they’ve got to get there with US-supplied cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles coming at them; they’d have to sink the Taiwanese navy and submarines; and then you arrive on land where there will be thousands of people waiting for you - both in the military, and mobilised personnel.
Taiwan will make itself a porcupine. A small, really sharp, nasty little thing that is just indigestible to China.
There is also the international response to consider. With the West focused on Ukraine, is there enough capacity in the system to handle another crisis in southeast Asia?
If you were Xi Jinping, would you gamble that there is not?
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