China’s hostility towards Taiwan continues to escalate, with increasingly powerful demonstrations of its military might. But is it getting ready to invade? Or blockade?
Chairman Xi Jinping has begun the first year of his previously unconstitutional third term by declaring his desire to revive China’s reputation. But his military is busily doing the opposite.
Taiwan was this week forced to scramble its fighter jets, deploy two of its warships and activate defensive missile systems in response to a major Chinese sortie.
On Tuesday, some 34 combat aircraft and nine warships were nosing around its borders. And this was just one patrol of many in the past month intended to intimidate the island democracy.
What started as an irregular annoyance in recent decades has blown out to become a major military campaign.
China’s testing of Taiwan’s air defence zone – one step short of breaching its sovereign territory – doubled in size and frequency last year.
Beijing sent 1727 aircraft into the zone in 2022, up from 960 in 2021 and 380 in 2020. About 1241 of these flights were by strike fighters, and 101 were nuclear-capable H6 strategic bombers.
And if January is any indication, it’s set to double again.
While fears of an imminent cross-strait invasion are rising, some analysts anticipate a more diplomatically complex move: A blockade.
To fight, or not to fight?
An all-out assault by China to depose the Taiwanese government by military force is highly likely to trigger a regional war with the United States and its allies, including Australia and Japan.
But what if Beijing instead tries to bring Taipei to its knees without firing a shot?
“What I fear is that China will not do a frontal assault on Taiwan, but they will begin to do one thing after another that never quite gives the United States or Japan or the Quad Alliance any casus belli (justification for war),” said the director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society, Orville Schell.
And RAND Corporation China specialist Dr Timothy Heath believes Chairman Xi has blown his opportunity to stage a successful invasion by gutting the economy and losing the respect of his people.
“Beijing’s military options against Taiwan are constrained by the consequences of declining state capacity and legitimacy,” Dr Heath wrote.
“Incapable of reversing the situation, Beijing will face growing incentives to favour more limited courses of action when contemplating military options against Taiwan.”
Like President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine debacle, however, Chairman Xi’s success will depend on whether or not Taiwan and its allies play by his rules.
Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan has no friendly borders over which arms and ammunition can be rushed. This means any attempt to materially support Taipei would trigger a military clash.
“Even in the case of an island seizure or blockade, Beijing would need to face the unappetising prospect of an uncontrolled escalation should US forces intervene in a significant way,” Dr Heath warned.
But the same prospect confronts the governments in Washington, Canberra and Tokyo. Do they have the political will to trigger the first shot?
Maintaining face
China’s air and naval drills have repeatedly demonstrated it can quickly close the waters around Taiwan to all traffic. And Chairman Xi could justify such a move to his home audience by declaring foreign nations had “crossed the line” in promoting Taiwan’s independence.
Beijing showed its ability to effectively block international shipping lanes around Taiwan after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit. It conducted six live-fire exercises that forced shipping and aircraft to redirect. Some missiles even fell within Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
And its ongoing large-scale air and sea patrols demonstrate that it can sustain such an effort indefinitely.
But Quincy Institute East Asia Program researcher Michael Swaine argues Beijing and Washington are already locked into a “confrontational action-reaction cycle” that could unintentionally “spark a military conflict”.
And it’s not actually about Taiwan.
“Neither Washington nor Beijing have ever regarded Taiwan as a key strategic linchpin in the region,” Swaine argued.
“For China, reunification with Taiwan is above all else an issue of territorial integrity and national pride; as such, it is critical to the legitimacy of the Communist Party regime in the eyes of its people. For the United States, Taiwan is linked to Washington’s credibility as a loyal supporter of a democratic friend and an ally to others such as Japan and South Korea.”
Starvation tactics
Self-ruled Taiwan has been under constant threat of invasion since the Chinese civil war of 1949. Communist Party forces could not finish the job by crossing the Taiwan Strait to overthrow the Republic of China government in exile there.
But the Communist Party has since built a narrative around Taiwan being a “renegade province” and an “inalienable part” of China. Taiwan agrees – yet considers the mainland to be renegade and an “inalienable part” of the Republic of China.
Recent surveys show Taiwan is growing increasingly distant from its mainland heritage. More people now think of themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. And Beijing’s recent abandonment of its so-called “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong demonstrates the Communist Party’s unwillingness to compromise.
Chairman Xi will need something more dramatic than appealing to a long-past nationalism to bring Taiwan under the Party’s yoke.
Halting traffic to its three major ports would cut crucial wheat and corn supplies. Not to mention critical gas, coal and oil imports.
But a blockade would have an equally significant impact on the global economy. Taiwan supplies 92 per cent of the world’s most advanced computer chips. The global consumer electronics industry would be experiencing severe shortages within a month.
Economic think-tank The Rhodium Group recently published a report analysing the potential disruptions of such a blockade.
“Ultimately, the full social and economic impacts of a chip shortage of that scale are incalculable, but they would likely be catastrophic,” it read.
“A rough, conservative estimate of dependence on Taiwanese chips suggests that companies in these industries could be forced to forego as much as $1.6 trillion in revenue annually in the event of a blockade.”
And the downstream fallout is orders of magnitude greater.
“Unsurprisingly, we find that the scale of economic activity at risk of disruption from a conflict in the Taiwan Strait is immense: well over two trillion dollars in a blockade scenario, even before factoring international responses or second-order effects,” it warned.
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel