'The lesson from Ukraine is size doesn't matter': senior Taiwanese official on PRC invasion threat

The Bureau examines potential of a Chinese invasion on Taiwan with senior Taiwanese officials and military experts

TAIPEI, Taiwan

In recent wargaming scenarios China’s lightning assault across the Taiwan Strait always starts the same way.

People’s Liberation Army missiles, ships and aircraft pound Taiwan’s navy and air force, decimating both fleets within hours, while Chinese vessels form a fiery circle around the large island, blocking external efforts to replenish Taiwan’s forces.

Swarms of smaller ships and amphibious craft send tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers to shore, men crawling under stretches of barbed wire as planes send paratroopers floating down behind the beachheads — all aiming to regroup, build supplies and move inland, forcing Taiwan to capitulate within days.

The Chinese invasion threat is not only plausible, some experts believe, but rising in probability, as the Chinese Communist Party races to deliver on rigid ideological milestones that President Xi Jinping set out in 2017.

The present danger has been building ever since China’s nationalist government lost a civil war to Chairman Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and retreated to the 36,000 square kilometre tropical island in 1949.

In the following decades Taiwan has blossomed, quite miraculously, into a thriving democracy with all the elements of a successful state. But the People’s Republic is threatened by Taiwan’s success, maintains it is nothing more than a renegade province, and blocks other states from recognizing Taiwan’s sovereignty.

As the most singularly powerful and ideologically driven People’s Republic leader since Chairman Mao, Xi has staked his legacy on delivering a nationalistic vision he calls the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” by 2049, at latest.

Xi has also promised to modernize the People’s Liberation Army by 2027 — its 100th anniversary — and to double China’s economy from present levels by 2035.

Even if Xi accomplishes some of these objectives — increasingly difficult as China’s economy stagnates and internal social problems surface — his major promises fall flat if Taiwan’s democracy continues to flourish.

Underlining the fact, in a speech in 2021, Xi declared “the historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled,” and Taiwan’s separatism presents the “biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation.”

And so a strange contradiction persists.

It is symbolized neatly by the setting of Taipei, a bustling capital city of 2.6 million where citizens and many tourists pleasantly go about their business amidst modern high-rises, streets canopied by mossy banyan, almond and willow trees, older brick and concrete residences that seem to sag in the coastal humidity, and narrow alleys filled with noodle shops and the smell of pork buns.

Meanwhile, just offshore, China’s buzzing war machine is increasingly intruding in Taiwan’s air and water space, with daily sorties and periodic shows of force ramping up since 2019 and going off the charts last August, when Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Taipei.

In the clearest single yet that Taiwan has become the predominant flashpoint in a growing great power competition between China and the United States, Beijing surrounded the island with ships and fired 11 missiles towards or over Taiwan.

This aggression has reached a new elevated plateau, Taiwanese military experts and officials told international journalists on Monday, as Chinese planes and vessels cross into and stay in Taiwanese territory longer, in actions viewed as a type of cognitive warfare aimed at eroding the people’s will to resist.

“China makes many excuses to conduct military exercises around Taiwan, and I don’t think this is only political,” said Dr. Tzu-Chieh Hung, of the Institute for National Defense Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s government. “I think they are expanding the area of their military operations.”

“We think they are trying to create a new normal, when we will become numb to their actions, and make it a fait accompli,” another senior Taiwanese official told The Bureau.

Not long ago many geopolitical experts would have said China had already accomplished this mission within the international community.

Although close to half of the world’s products are shipped through the Taiwan Strait and the island produces about 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips — which means the peaceful continuity of Taiwan has become crucial for global supply chains — many Western onlookers have quietly opined that defending an island of about 24 million people located 180 kilometres away from an increasingly hostile state of 1.4 billion, is impossible.

That hasn’t been the view in classified studies at high levels of the United States military, though.

And earlier this year, a groundbreaking wargaming study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, found that Taiwan indeed could fend off a Chinese invasion, provided its leaders and people are prepared to fight, and the United States and Japan join forces to supply devastating airborne and missile firepower against the Chinese fleets that would blockade Taiwan in an invasion. 

“There is no question, two years ago most people would have said China has the ability to conquer Taiwan in a fait accompli,” Mark Cancian, one of the study’s authors, told The Bureau. “But we showed that is not true.”

Cancian and his team looked at all available data on weapons and bases that China, Taiwan, Japan and the United States could muster, accounted for historical operations, ran various models of what shape battles would likely take, and did the exercise over 20 times.

In most cases Taiwan and the United States and Japan prevailed, although all sides sustained heavy damage and lost many thousands of lives.

The outcomes for China — including leaving thousands of prisoners of war in Taiwan — could realistically destabilize the Chinese Communist Party, the study found.

There are several key assumptions in these war games for Taiwan’s successful defence, Cancian said.

First, there is no Ukraine strategy for Taiwan.

While international powers have been able to share a steady supply of weapons and even provide training for Ukraine’s military during Russia’s invasions, that would not be possible for Taiwan.

“The Chinese defensive bubble at the start of the war is so strong, that Taiwan needs what it has to fight with for the first month or two,” Cancian said. “And the United States has to participate en masse and quickly. Japan must at least provide base capacity for U.S. forces, and Taiwan must defend itself.”

The first week of the envisioned invasion could look good for China, Cancian says, but the following weeks would likely turn the tide.

“We briefed our results up to senior people in the Department of Defense,” he added, “and they said, ‘This looks about right.’”

Asked by The Bureau for his current invasion threat assessment, in comparison to the Chinese military escalation surrounding Pelosi’s visit a year ago, Cancian answered: “I would say the threat level has gone up.”