A worrying spike in Chinese military activity near Taiwan since the beginning of 2020 has led some analysts to conclude that Beijing is exploiting a moment of distraction within the international system due to the COVID-19 pandemic to intimidate Taiwan and create a fait accompli in the Taiwan Strait. Closer analysis of trends that predate the outbreak, however, suggests that Beijing would have adopted the same escalatory strategy regardless of the international situation.
The National Interest
Date: June 10, 2020
By: by J. Michael Cole
Aworrying spike in Chinese military activity near Taiwan since the beginning of 2020 has led some analysts to conclude that Beijing is exploiting a moment of distraction within the international system due to the COVID-19 pandemic to intimidate Taiwan and create a fait accompli in the Taiwan Strait. Closer analysis of trends that predate the outbreak, however, suggests that Beijing would have adopted the same escalatory strategy regardless of the international situation.
Well before the outbreak of COVID-19 in late December 2019, Beijing had steadily increased the frequency of People’s Liberation Army Navy and Air Force transits across the Taiwan Strait as well as through the Strait of Miyako between Japan and Taiwan, and the Bashi Channel that separates the democratic island-nation and the Philippines. Brief intrusions by PLAAF aircraft near or into Taiwan’s Air Defense and Identification Zone (ADIZ), added to penetrations by Chinese military aircraft across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, were already more frequent prior to the global pandemic.
The motives for this gradual increase in PLA activity near and around Taiwan are instead related to two key factors. First, higher traffic has been the natural outcome of China’s attempt to expand and consolidate its presence beyond the first island chain into the West Pacific and the South China Sea. This expansion is also related to Beijing’s ongoing effort to push the U.S. military out of what it regards as its avowed sphere of influence. Due to the vagaries of geography, Taiwan happens to stand in the middle of all that activity. Thus, while every sortie, passage, transit and exercise causes alarm in Taiwan and compels its military to scramble interceptors, it would be mistaken to regard the Beijing’s more assertive military activity in its totality as a javelin aimed at Taiwan.
Nevertheless — and this leads us to the second factor — the Chinese leadership has no compunction with the psychological effects that its military escalation may have on the Taiwanese public, even if, in some instances, such considerations may be secondary. Be that as it may, a substantial component of PLA activity in recent years has indeed been directed at Taiwan. This activity stems from the need for an increasingly expeditionary Chinese military to familiarize itself with, as well as collect intelligence about, Taiwan and its surroundings; to challenge an uptick in passages by U.S. and foreign military air and naval platforms in the region; as well as to wage, as we saw, a psychological war against the Tsai Ing-wen administration in Taipei. [FULL STORY8]
