China’s Drills Around Taiwan Give Hint About Its Strategy - WSJ 2022/8/9 下午12:06

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WORLDASIACHINA

China’s Drills Around Taiwan Give Hint About Its Strategy

A blockade, not an invasion, could be a less risky way for Beijing to exert its will

By Charles Hutzler
Updated Aug. 4, 2022 1:31 pm ET

China’s live-fire exercises around Taiwan this week are simulating the steps it might
take to seal off the island with a blockade, previewing the kind of coercive tactics
Chinese leaders may employ in a future conflict.

The four-day exercises, to protest the visit to Taipei earlier this week by House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, started at noon on Thursday in six zones that effectively
encircle Taiwan. Several of the zones face the island’s biggest commercial ports and
overlap with what Taipei claims as its territorial waters, coming within 12 miles of its
coastline in what some military analysts have compared with a temporary blockade.

Beijing sees Taiwan as Chinese territory to be taken by force if necessary and has
undertaken a decadeslong military buildup to achieve that goal and deter the U.S., the
island’s longtime security partner. Still, many military analysts and China specialists
think Beijing lacks capabilities to launch an outright invasion, making such an
operation too complex and risky in the next few years.

Instead, in a crisis, they think Beijing would try to squeeze rather than flatten Taiwan
into submission.

“They are amassing forces to look like a blockade to show that they can do it,” said
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in
Washington. “It’s a signaling exercise.”

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The Chinese military started the exercises Thursday with drills involving warplanes
and ships, as well as multiple ballistic missiles fired into waters bracketing
Taiwan. Military analysts expect large naval and air maneuvers to be staged in
coming days to demonstrate control of the waters around Taiwan.

The proximity of the action to ports and shipping lanes has forced some delays for
cargo and aviation, a small taste of the pain China could inflict on Taiwan and world
markets. The self-governed island is a leading producer of the advanced
semiconductors critical to products from cars to advanced weaponry.

“This establishes an encirclement of Taiwan island,” Major Gen. Meng Xiangqing, a

professor at the PLA National Defense University, told China’s state broadcaster
Thursday morning ahead of the drills. “This creates very good conditions for
reshaping the strategic situation in a way that benefits unification.”

When the exercises conclude, military analysts and China specialists said they would
watch to see if Chinese forces linger or if drills close to Taiwan become routine. If so,
such exercises could become a tool to intermittently disrupt Taiwan’s economy and
its ties with the world in an attempt to erode popular support for the government and
resistance to Beijing, the analysts said.

“China probably doesn’t want to go to war to achieve its ends,” said Bradley Martin, a
retired Navy officer and researcher at Rand Corp. “What we see as more likely is to
exert a level of force below the level of outright conflict.”

That below-threshold type of conflict, sometimes called “gray-zone” warfare by some

experts, is part of China’s playbook with Taiwan and countries in the region with
which it has territorial disputes.

China’s fishing fleet, sometimes backed by China’s coast guard or navy, has swarmed
ships of neighboring countries in contested waters. Cyberattacks, another common
feature, have frequently targeted Taiwan, including this week when the presidential
office and Defense Ministry’s websites were hit with denial of service attacks that the
government attributed to overseas hackers.

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China also has turned to forms of economic coercion such as import bans in
disagreements with Australia, Canada and others. An immediate casualty of the
Pelosi visit were Chinese imports of Taiwanese citrus and other agricultural
products.

A full naval blockade banning all ship traffic would be considered an act of war. China
is much more likely to launch a selective quarantine—an option discussed in Chinese
military journals, Dr. Martin said. That would give Chinese authorities the option to
interdict some vessels while allowing supplies of food, for example, to go through.

That approach places the burden of escalation on the incoming ships, which need to
decide whether to cooperate or resist, according to a research paper on the use of
coercive quarantines that Dr. Martin co-wrote at Rand.

China has invested heavily in its navy, outnumbering the U.S. in ships, and has made
advances in anti-submarine warfare. Faced with a Chinese cordon, the U.S. might
have to decide whether to risk a shooting exchange or capitulate, the Rand paper said.

“Inaction is tantamount to accepting the PRC’s actions,” the paper said, using the
initials for the People’s Republic of China.

A Taiwan quarantine is the kind of low-intensity challenge that the U.S. might find
tricky to manage, analysts said. The U.S. is bound by law to ensure Taiwan can defend
itself. Beyond that, the U.S. has maintained a policy called strategic ambiguity which
raises the prospect of but doesn’t explicitly promise American intervention in hopes
of keeping both Beijing and Taipei from resorting to force. President Biden has
promised the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked, though analysts
said the ambiguity remains in other scenarios.

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A blockade or a quarantine are scenarios that members of the national security

establishment and some members of Congress say the U.S. military and Taiwan’s
forces aren’t ready for. They have called on the U.S. to build a bigger Navy and invest
in bases to disperse military assets around the Asia-Pacific region.

If a Chinese quarantine squeezed world supplies of semiconductors, support for

Taiwan in Europe and other advanced economies could crumble, raising the stakes
for the U.S., the Rand paper said. Europe’s unity against Russia’s war in Ukraine has
shown signs of fraying as Moscow throttles supplies of natural gas, raising costs for
European businesses and consumers.

Concerns that Taiwan may be vulnerable to Chinese invasion or other coercion is one
reason the U.S. enacted recent legislation providing tens of billions of dollars in
subsidies to encourage the semiconductor industry to produce more chips in the U.S.

Early this year, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who served in
the Marines, warned that the U.S.-China balance of military power over Taiwan was
shifting in favor of Beijing. A plan he released, Battle Force 2025, called on the U.S. to
steel Taiwan for any blockade.

That means the U.S. must ensure Taiwan has adequate supplies of food and water, he
said. The Rand paper suggests including raw ingredients for pharmaceuticals and
ample reserves of oil.

Whatever China does, said China specialist Yun Sun with the Stimson Center national
security think tank in Washington, “the burden will fall the heaviest on Taiwan.”

—Nancy A. Youssef and Wenxin Fan contributed to this article.

Write to Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com

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China’s Drills Around Taiwan Give Hint About Its Strategy - WSJ 2022/8/9 下午12:06

Appeared in the August 5, 2022, print edition as 'Drills Hint At Beijing’s Strategy'.

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