Don’t be fooled by China’s latest military exercises in Taiwan

China’s military exercises last week which ‘sealed off’ the island of Taiwan may look less aggressive than those held in 2022, but in some ways, they are more concerning.

Despite not launching ballistic missiles over Taipei, which happened last year, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) simulated direct strikes on Taiwan, surrounded it with ships and planes, and on several occasions crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait. The PLA Navy deployed the aircraft carrier Shandong through the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines after which it conducted take-off and landing drills on the Pacific side of the island close to Japanese territorial waters. Tokyo scrambled fighter jets in response and America’s US Nimitz aircraft carrier stayed nearby.

The exercises were in response to Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California. Beijing had to calibrate a response it felt appropriate to the ‘provocation’, but different from the one it made last August after then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

It combined loud sabre rattling with military signalling. The Shandong’s route took it from the west of the island to the south, near territory where China has a dispute with the Philippines, before heading round to the east of Taiwan. The PLA was testing how many landings and take offs of J-15 fighter jets and helicopters the carrier could handle per day. Dozens of sorties were flown on each of the three days of exercises, far fewer than any of the US carriers can manage but still an advance in combat readiness.

 China has two carrier groups and has now demonstrated it can use them to threaten the west and east coasts of Taiwan simultaneously, and potentially deter US access to the waters around the island. J-15s from the Chinese mainland carried out hundreds of sorties with dozens crossing the median line and entering Taiwan’s air identification zone before turning back.

Until 2020, Beijing mostly stopped short of the median line and only crossed when it wanted to demonstrate anger at a perceived provocation. Crossings have become more frequent, and since the Pelosi visit are almost routine as Beijing seeks to normalise its actions.

PLA ships entered Taiwan’s 24-nautical mile contiguous zone and were met by the Taiwanese navy in a tense stand-off. Shortly before the de-facto blockade of the island began, China’s coastguard claimed the right to stop and board all vessels in the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. Taipei ordered Taiwanese ships to ignore the claim, but Beijing had put another marker down on its claim to have sovereignty over the whole of the South China Sea.

There was a lot going on. China simulated the sort of blockade which it could try and impose periodically and, unless confronted by the US, use to slowly strangle Taiwan into submission. The exercises also simulated some of the actions which would be taken ahead of a seaborne invasion although it did not attempt to practice assembling an invasion force (a process which could take months). For good measure Beijing put out a computer simulation showing missiles exploding in the two main Taiwanese cities -Tapei and Kaohsiung.

The event, and especially the presence of the Shandong close to the Japanese island of Okinawa, showed the potential of the Taiwan issue to draw in neighbouring states and the US. Okinawa hosts almost 30,000 US military personnel including 20,000 from the Marine Corp. As well as keeping the Nimitz in place the Americans sailed a guided-missile destroyer close to Mischief Reef, one of the disputed Spratly islands which China has turned into a military air strip.

It was a reminder that Taiwan is about more than the rights of the Taiwanese to choose their future and not have it imposed on them by a one-party state dictatorship. The issue is about freedom of navigation on the high seas, global trade, and whether the democracies in the region feel safe enough to resist Chinese domination. That in turn is about the future of democracy in the 21st century.

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