But the regime in Taipei long ago abandoned the fiction that it is the lawful government of mainland China. Just as the Chinese Communist Party has never governed Taiwan, the government in Taiwan has never ruled the mainland.
Since the s, the island has metamorphosed into a thriving democracy that abjures any interest in exerting power across the Taiwan Strait. More than Chinese war planes have crossed the line in October alone. Yet China shows no inclination to dial back its belligerent rhetoric and behavior. Why should it? The United States and its allies should have put an end to this long ago.
Taiwan is modest in area, but it is home to The conquest of Taiwan by China would be cataclysmic. International trade would be thrown into chaos.
Taiwan's presidential office has said it would neither give in to pressure nor "rashly advance" when it gets support. China has not yet responded. Tensions have been rising between Taiwan and China in recent weeks after Beijing flew dozens of warplanes into Taiwan's air defence zone.
With all the recent talk of war for control of Taiwan, it's important to remember a few things. Any attempt by Beijing to retake the island by force would be a gruesome, difficult task. This doesn't mean it will never happen but the Chinese leader who ordered an attack would be endorsing Han Chinese fighting Han Chinese in a bloody, ideological conflict with high-tech lethal weaponry. It wouldn't matter how well the Chinese government may have believed it had prepared people on the mainland for such a conflict, pumping them with propaganda about Taiwanese splittists et cetera.
It wouldn't matter how gloriously the war mongering Global Times newspaper had portrayed the campaign; any images of distantly related enemy soldiers lying dead on the beaches of Kenting would be hard to whitewash. Then, after seizing Taiwan, there would also be the not inconsiderable challenge of retaining control of a territory where the vast majority of the 24 million-strong population are opposed to Communist Party rule.
Apart from being responsible for all this, the leader who ordered such an offensive would also be responsible for causing massive regional instability, potentially drawing in troops from the United States as well as other countries like Australia or even Japan. Xi Jinping would clearly love to re-unite Taiwan with the Chinese mainland under his leadership but, when you add all this up, you can see how high the stakes are.
Despite the increasingly fiery rhetoric coming out of certain Chinese media outlets you would have to think that cooler heads in the Chinese government would not be considering an imminent assault. It's called the PCL, and it's a glorified version of the "Stalin organ" and other multiple rocket launchers of Second World War vintage, but with a range of km. There are eight or 12 rockets on each mobile launcher, depending on the range and the explosive power required, and they can be reloaded quite fast.
There are already two brigades of these rocket-launchers stationed on the Chinese coast facing Taiwan, and the number is going up all the time. Soon, if not already, they will give Beijing the power to launch saturation strikes on all of Taiwan's airfields, radar stations, anti-aircraft defences and ports simultaneously. If all the runways and ports in Taiwan are shattered, then its planes and warships cannot stop Chinese assault troops crossing the Strait in ships 10 hours , and nobody else will be close enough to help even if they want to.
Taiwan is at extreme range for fighter aircraft based in Japan, and the US Pacific Fleet is very unlikely to be within reach if the attack is a surprise. So what "other things" may still deter China from making such an attack even after it has enough rocket launchers on the coast? Just one is enough: the certainty that even if the United States could not intervene militarily in time to save Taiwan, it would certainly institute a complete naval blockade of China immediately afterwards.
That might be of little consolation to the Taiwanese, but the Chinese economy is utterly dependent on foreign trade, and China's geography makes it extremely vulnerable to blockade. In practice, there's no way out: China's economy would be strangled within months. Further escalation by either side would be deterred by the fear of nuclear war, and some sort of deal would have to be made. It could be very humiliating for China, perhaps so humiliating that it would even undermine the control of the Communist Party.
So Xi Jinping won't ever really risk it.
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