Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, in an exclusive interview with Guardian, has said that China is preparing to find another “pretext for practising their future attack” on the island. The island has witnessed a record number of military threats and incursions this year, raising fears that Beijing’s military threat was “getting more serious than ever”.
Reportedly, there has been a five-fold increase in warplane incursions into Taiwan’s defence zone since 2020.
Wu added that following last month’s removal of several rival Communist party members, cross-strait communications are likely to diminish even further now, especially given that Xi Jinping has secured a third term.
The biggest military exercises were conducted in August when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.
Chinese officials said the exercises were a practice of blockade tactics that will be used against Taiwan for real some day. Analysts believe the scale of the exercises suggests that China had been preparing for them for a ling time and Pelosi’s visit provided them with an excuse to conduct them.
“And we are quite sure that the Chinese may want to use another pretext of practising their future attacks against Taiwan. So this is a military threat against Taiwan,” said Wu.
Wu further said that besides military tactics, China is also ramping up other measures aimed at weakening and isolating Taiwan. These include economic coercion, cyber-attacks, and cognitive and legal warfare.
Taiwan’s air defence zone has already had incursions from 1,500 Chinese warplanes this year, as compared to 380 in 2020. Such events heighten the risk of accidents, leading to escalation of issues. However, while previously cross strait communications settled such matters, Tsai Ing-wen’s election as president in 2016 led to the severing of official ties.
Wu said that Taiwanese businesspeople and academics who had “good connections with the Chinese side” earlier helped them with communication. But a political purge following Xi’s re-election has shut those doors.
“It is because the Chinese government system has become so authoritarian. It’s not like the old days when regular academia could write recommendations to the central government and are able to get in touch with the key decision-makers and tell us what is the thinking of the top leaders, things like that,” he said.
“In these couple of years, we are seeing that Chinese academia are afraid of saying different things other than Chinese propaganda… He (Xi) is the paramount leader and there’s no one else challenging him right now.”
(With inputs from agencies)
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