This Is How Taiwan’s Military Would Go To War With China

BY ROY CHOO
NOV 17th, 2022

With tensions this year between China and Taiwan rising to their highest since the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-96, numerous pundits have posited that the possibility of actual conflict cannot be discounted in the years ahead.

At the launch of the 20th Communist Party Congress on October 16, President Xi Jinping vowed that China would “never commit to abandoning the use of force” to seize Taiwan. The conclusion of the congress saw him securing not only a historic third term as China’s leader but also placing loyalists in the leading party. This will ensure the consolidation of his grip on the country’s decision-making power with little opposition.

Capturing Taiwan by force will no doubt be a high-risk gambit and could prove to be politically destabilizing if war plans were to go awry. However, Beijing’s use of its soft power — through economic and cultural leverage — to draw the island closer has not yielded any results. Hence, it has turned to the use of hard power, in the form of the PLA, to apply coercion and intimidation.

Starting from ‘island encirclement’ drills by H-6 bombers from 2016 when independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen took office, China’s gray-zone assault on the island has been progressively stepped up to frequent incursions into its southwestern corner of the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) since 2020.

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