Taiwan

America can save Taiwan from Chinese invasion by promising to destroy it, or at least its chipmaking capability, argues an article in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College’s quarterly. In “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” Air University’s Jared McKinney and Colorado State University’s Peter Harris say that Taipei and Washington should make the island “unwantable.”

“I’ve written before about China’s increasingly brazen indications that it plans to force a “reunification” with Taiwan sometime in the not-so-distant future. For its part, Taiwan is clearly worried about the possibility China could overwhelm its defenses but remains defiant. The US has been selling Taiwan arms, sending warships through the Taiwan strait  and even training Taiwanese troops. All of it raises the possibility of a real confrontation over Taiwan, one that could be extremely costly to both China and the US.

Would Taiwan agree to a scorched earth policy?

TAIPEI – For more than 20 years, Xie Xizhang presented himself as a Hong Kong businessman on visits to Taiwan. He now stands accused of having another mission: recruiting spies for China.

On one trip in 2006, Xie met a senior retired Taiwanese navy officer, Chang Pei-ning, over a meal, according to official documents accusing the pair of espionage. Chang would become one of Xie’s agents, the documents allege, helping him penetrate Taiwan’s active military leadership as part of a long-running Chinese operation to build a spy ring among serving and retired military officers.

The Taiwanese officers and their families were allegedly lured by Xie’s offers of all-expenses-paid trips abroad, thousands of dollars in cash payments, and gifts such as silk scarves and belts for their wives. In June 2019, counter-espionage officers moved against Xie’s network, launching raids that uncovered further evidence, according to the documents, which were reviewed by Reuters. Now, Chang is facing espionage charges and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Xie. According to a person familiar with the case, Xie is not in Taiwan.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned on Saturday that the Chinese regime’s repeated military air activities near Taiwan appear to be a “rehearsal” for future military operations against the self-ruled island.

Austin issued the warning on Dec. 4 while speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. He made the comment about Taiwan while addressing the overall challenges posed by the “emergence of an increasingly assertive and autocratic China.”

I would not be very confident of US assistance if I were Taiwan. Biden’s America will not go to war for them or the Ukraine for the matter. Joe is on the take and US is rife with Quislings sympathetic to totalitarian regimes solely because they share a common enemy – The USA.

Seventy-two years ago, the Communist Party seized control of China after a bloody struggle. The defeated Nationalist government fled to Taiwan, frustrating Beijing’s desire to capture the island. Since then, China has arisen as a superpower rivaling America; Taiwan has blossomed into a self-governing democracy and high-tech powerhouse with Washington’s backing. Now, after decades of tenuous stalemate, there is a renewed risk of conflict. While it is impossible to know how this long rivalry will play out, in some respects the battle for Taiwan is already underway.

As Reuters reported in December, the Chinese military – the People’s Liberation Army – is waging so-called gray-zone warfare against Taiwan. This consists of an almost daily campaign of intimidating military exercises, patrols and surveillance that falls just short of armed conflict. Since that report, the campaign has intensified, with Beijing stepping up the number of warplanes it is sending into the airspace around Taiwan. China has also used sand dredgers to swarm Taiwan’s outlying islands.

“The island’s society must be warned that they better not believe the ‘rock solid’ promise of the U.S. because Washington will never fight to the death with the Chinese mainland for the island’s secession,” the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times proclaimed on October 14, referring to Taiwan.

The words, contained in an editorial, reflects the Party’s propaganda line, and that line almost certainly reflects the thinking of Chinese leaders.