China Edges Toward Armed Conflict With Unprecedented Military Threats Against Taiwan: Experts

A missile is launched from an unspecified location in China on Aug. 4, 2022. The Chinese military fired missiles into waters near Taiwan as part of its planned exercises on Aug. 4. (CCTV via AP)

News Analysis

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its largest ever joint military exercises this month in retaliation to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the self-ruled island the regime considers as its own. Experts are divided, however, as to whether the drills are mere bluster or present an escalation toward armed hostilities.

The drills resulted in a de facto blockade of Taiwan which interfered with international travel and shipping lanes, and saw the launch of at least 11 hypersonic missiles, some of which flew directly over Taiwan and landed in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

The White House said that China had positioned its military to take further action in the region, but did not specify what that future action might be.

Defense and security experts disagree on the purpose of the exercises. Some consider the CCP’s hawkish behavior to be propaganda designed to garner domestic support ahead of an important political meeting later this year. Others believe the regime is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan.

Chinese fighter jets fly in the sky near Taiwan in a still from a video released by Chinese state-run media CCTV on Aug. 7, 2022. (CCTV via Reuters/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

CCP is ‘Trying to Look Strong’

Greg Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, said that CCP bluster surrounding Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was probably more closely linked to China’s domestic politics than any ambition to conquer Taiwan.

The scale of the exercises, he added, indicated that they had been planned months in advance.

“They’ve been thinking about this for some time,” Copley said in an interview with NTD, sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.

“They probably would have found another excuse to mount those war games before the 20th Party Congress in Beijing in November.”

The CCP’s upcoming Party Congress is a vital event in the Chinese political space, as it will include an election to determine if CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping receives a historic third term in office.

Copley said that Xi was likely attempting to placate hawks at home with his aggressive military posturing, and could become more emboldened and jingoistic should he be reelected in November.

“It’s all about trying to look strong in the run up to the 20th Party Congress to avoid being eclipsed by any domestic adversary,” Copley said.

“While Beijing thinks that it can tighten the noose around the neck of Taiwan, it’s still a very difficult proposition for the Communist Party to entertain.”

Copley added that leadership in the CCP’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), did not believe a full-scale invasion of Taiwan was a good idea in any circumstance.

Rather, he said, CCP authorities “painted themselves into a corner” by relying on threats which failed to dissuade Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and left the regime little option but to bluster about with its drills to save face.

“They had plenty of time to prepare considered responses to [the visit], but they did not,” Copley said. “Instead, they returned to their old methodology of threats, bluster, intimidation, and the old ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy.”

That CCP’s aggressive diplomacy was on full display in the leadup to Pelosi’s trip, as regime authorities from Xi downward doubled down on bellicose rhetoric.

Xi himself told President Joe Biden that he was “playing with fire” over the Taiwan issue, and a propagandist aligned with state-run media outlets urged the PLA to shoot down Pelosi’s plane if it entered Taiwan’s airspace with a military escort.

For Copley, the escalating rhetoric and exercises demonstrated that the regime was not willing to initiate a “hot” war for Taiwan, but was instead preparing forceful measures short of war to coerce Taiwan.

“I think one of the things the war games showed us was not that they were preparing an imminent physical invasion of Taiwan, but rather they were looking at methods short of a physical invasion,” Copley said.

“In other words, a quarantining of all trade into and out of Taiwan by being able to blockade ocean and air links and the like.”

The Rocket Force under the PLA Eastern Theatre Command fires live missiles into the waters near Taiwan, from an undisclosed location in China on Aug. 4, 2022. (Eastern Theatre Command/Handout via Reuters)

Creeping Escalation

Others believe that the CCP’s efforts to demonstrate its blockade capacity show a serious will to escalate toward conflict with Taiwan.

Speaking during the height of China’s exercises, John Culver, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said that the real tell of China’s intent would be precisely in whether the regime completed its exercises by practicing blockades and bombing runs around Taiwan.

“If what we’re seeing might be a rehearsal of kind of the standard war plan, which begins with a joint firepower strike carried out largely by ballistic and cruise missiles, and then is followed by naval and air exercises, if what they are kind of rehearsing or demonstrating here is the ability to use joint firepower strikes for a blockade, the next step should be air and naval maneuvers,” Culver said during a talk with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

The CCP did just that, closing its drills with “joint blockade, sea assault, and land and air combat trainings,” according to Chinese state-owned media. Those drills were then followed by an announcement of “normalized” patrols of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and incursions across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, the 110-mile wide body of water separating the island from mainland China.

Whereas the regime has launched incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ for several years now, the CCP’s newly established and apparently permanent presence on the eastern side of the median line presents a real gain for the Chinese regime’s claims that the region is its own territory.

Moreover, the CCP seems intent on keeping those gains.

To that end, Culver said that the CCP retained the capacity to inflict devastating harm on Taiwan, while simultaneously deterring the United States from intervening.

“They have enormous capability to cut Taiwan off from the outside world, to disrupt its information, to drop the power grid, to strike every significant military target on the island, and to strike every U.S. base in the region, and to attack U.S. warships that ingress beyond, within the range of Chinese long-range precision strikes,” Culver said.

“This is a very capable, highly modern, well-equipped military that’s been preparing for this mission, the Taiwan mission, for all of those years since the mid-’90s when China had little capability to actually effect military force to compel unification.”

Still, Culver believed that the global consequences that would naturally stem from such an attack, including a potential worldwide economic collapse, meant that the prospect of a full invasion of Taiwan was one the CCP was not excited about pursuing.

As such, current events were better seen as a sort of creeping series of escalations rather than a true embrace of conflict.

“I still believe that for Xi Jinping and the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, Taiwan is a crisis to be avoided, not an opportunity to be seized,” Culver said, referring to the 7-member body consisting of the CCP’s top leadership.

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping speaks at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress held at The Great Hall Of The People in Beijing, China, on Oct. 18, 2017. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The ‘New Normal’

Though the CCP may not actively be seeking war with Taiwan, Culver said, its encircling of Taiwan and expansion beyond the median line presented a definitive move away from the status quo that has guided Sino-American relations for more than 50 years.

“I think that this is the new normal,” Culver said. “The Chinese want to show, as they have in previous Taiwan Strait crises, that a line has been crossed by the speaker’s visit.”

“We can debate if we think that’s a legitimate beef by the Chinese. But I think we’re in a new era.”

The United States and China have conducted diplomacy over the last 50 years on the mutual assurance that neither side would attempt to unilaterally change the status quo regarding Taiwan.

The United States maintains a “One China Policy,” which among other things, formally recognizes—but does not endorse—the CCP’s “One China Principle” which declares that the regime has sovereignty over Taiwan.

As such, the United States maintains only unofficial ties with Taiwan. It is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the arms necessary for its self-defense, however, and the two maintain extensive commercial ties.

The issue of whether the United States would militarily intervene on Taiwan’s behalf in the event of a Chinese invasion is a matter of debate. The United States maintains a doctrine of so-called strategic ambiguity in which it will neither confirm nor deny its position on the issue.

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that it has long been understood that the language used to refer to the status quo made clear the United States would be willing to go to war should the CCP attempt to flip the script.

“Going back 50 years, our views on this issue [have] been clear in that regard, that this would be a matter of ‘grave concern,’ which is often diplomatic language that we would be willing to go to war over this,” Esper said during a talk at the Atlantic Council in July.

“It’s China that is undermining the One China Policy as all sides have understood it now for 50 years, and it’s China changing the status quo through force. Those are just the facts of the matter.”

The White House appeared to echo the sentiments.

“Beijing’s provocative actions are a significant escalation in its long-standing attempt to change the status quo,” said White House National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby following Pelosi’s visit.

“We’re not going to accept a new status quo. And it’s not just the United States, but the world as well.”

As such, the Biden administration and the CCP are at a crossroads. Either side believes the other to be unilaterally pushing for a change to the status quo, and neither side appears willing to proffer an off-ramp on the issue.

“There’s no natural end date, as there have been in past cross-Strait crises tied to a Taiwan election or an upcoming leader-level visit with the United States,” Culver said. “So, I think we’re in kind of an open-ended period here.”

“I don’t know how this ends. We have seen how it begins.”

A Navy Force helicopter under the Eastern Theatre Command of China's PLA takes part in military exercises in the waters around Taiwan, at an undisclosed location on Aug. 8, 2022. (Eastern Theatre Command/Handout via Reuters)

Battles in a New Cold War

All of this has served to transform the issue of Taiwan into a sort of critical battleground in what some have described as a new cold war between China and the United States.

Some experts, far from expressing the caution of Culver and Copley, believe the CCP is seeking to push that war to the next level.

“When, not if, but when China decides that it is going to either garrote the Taiwanese or seize their island, it will have profound implications for Americans,” said Frank Gaffney, executive director for the Center for Security Policy, during an interview with NTD.

“We’ve got a critical dependency, among other things, on a supply chain for advanced silicon chips, the vast majority of which are made on the island of Taiwan.”

Gaffney said that five to 10 percent of the United States’ GDP could be reduced if it lost access to those semiconductor chips, which are required to manufacture everything from modern pickup trucks to hypersonic missiles.

Vitally, one company in Taiwan, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, produces more than 52 percent of all the world’s semiconductors and more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductors.

As such, he believed a CCP seizure of Taiwan could be used to unravel the United States’ influence in the Indo-Pacific. More than that, he said, a CCP move on Taiwan could be the beginning of a war on the United States.

“Taiwan is not the main target,” Gaffney said. “The United States is.”

“This is a stepping stone, perhaps, to a kinetic war with the United States that the Chinese have been preparing for, for decades.”

In Gaffney’s view, ongoing posturing over Taiwan is a CCP effort to undermine U.S. hegemony that goes back two decades to the establishment of a military doctrine known variously as unrestricted warfare or hybrid warfare.

Developed by two PLA colonels in 1999, unrestricted warfare is a strategic concept that postulates one nation can defeat a technologically superior foe by engaging in non-military means such as psychological, political, and legal warfare.

Under this view, the CCP could be considered to already be at war with the United States without needing to have to engage in kinetic kill operations, as the majority of warfare would be conducted by non-military means.

“Hybrid warfare is characterized by using non-military methods to achieve political or military objectives,” said Casey Fleming, CEO at strategic advisory firm BlackOps Partners, in an email to the Epoch Times.

Within that framework, he said, the CCP ought to be understood as using its bluster against Taiwan to achieve the same goals that it might otherwise be required to resort to bloodshed to attain.

“Encircling the island of Taiwan is a CCP hybrid warfare tactic of weakening an adversary’s will and determination through psychological intimidation,” Fleming said.

“Pelosi’s Taiwan trip provided fuel for the CCP to take their aggression towards the free world up to the next level.”

To that end, Fleming said that the only feasible course of action the United States might take to prevent either bloodshed or a permanent change to the status quo vis-à-vis Taiwan was to engage its immense network of allies and partners to de-escalate tensions.

To do that, he said, it would need to ensure that the world understood that the current struggle over Taiwan was not just between two countries, China and the United States, but between the futures of democratic societies and autocracies.

Fleming said that the CCP believed the West’s values were a weakness to be exploited, and sought to weaponize the benefit of the doubt granted to it by the international community.

“The U.S. can deescalate tensions with the CCP by continuously beating the drum and alerting the free world to the CCP’s long history of human rights atrocities, extreme surveillance and control, and overall ruthless intentions of global domination.”