If China Attacks Taiwan

Military Strategy, Politics and Economics

Steve Tsang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136916335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is a new analysis of the key issues facing Chinese policy makers in their approach towards Taiwan. This is one of the most tense and potentially explosive relationships in world politics.

This book explains succinctly the impetus, the methods and the consequences if China is to use force, a prospect that has become greater following the return of President Chen Shui-bian to power in Taiwan for a second term in 2004.

If China Attacks Taiwan shows how in reality there can be no real winner in such an eventuality and how the consequences would be dire not just for Taiwan and China, but East Asia as a whole. Whether China will use force depends ultimately on how its policy making apparatus assess potential US intervention, whether its armed forces can subdue Taiwan and counter US military involvement, as well as on its assessment of the likely consequences. Given the extremely high probability of American involvement this volume appeals to not only scholars and students working on China, its foreign policy and the security and prosperity of East Asia, but also to policy makers and journalists interested in China's rise and its defense policy, Taiwan's security and development, regional stability as well as US policy toward China and the East Asia region generally. This book is essential for understanding China's efforts to achieve a 'peaceful rise', which requires it to transform itself into a global power not by the actual use of force but by diplomacy backed up by rapidly expanding military power.

This book is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of military and security studies, Asian (China/Taiwan) studies and international relations

1
DRIVERS BEHIND THE USE OF FORCE

Steve Tsang

Whether or not China uses force against Taiwan will be decided neither by the degree of economic integration across the Taiwan Strait, nor by a blatantly “provocative” act of declaring independence by Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian or his successor. Important as economic considerations are, they are not more significant than considerations of the “moral” strength of the case, or of the “honor” of the Chinese nation to right “a historic wrong” bequeathed by the history of “Western imperialist encroachment on sacred Chinese territories.” As Maochun Yu argues in Chapter 2, even though the Chinese have been remarkably unrestrained in re-interpreting history, it does play a critical role in conditioning the mindset of policy makers in Beijing over the issue of Taiwan.

In Taiwan, whatever the personal preference of Chen or any future leader holding the office of state President, he/she will not intentionally announce a policy that will immediately cause China to attack Taiwan. Given the certainty of China’s reactions to a formal declaration of independence by Taipei, no president in Taiwan would take such a step. Although public opinion in Taiwan continues to support governmental attempts to assert Taiwan’s sense of identity and its existing membership in the international community, it should not be equated with favoring or provoking a war with China.

War however, will most likely result if Beijing perceives Taipei’s next step as a step too far, or being the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.¹ Alternatively, some level of force may be used, should the Chinese government believe that it could bring Taiwan back into the fold of mother China, while simultaneously avoiding engagement in a full-scale war with the United States (US). China’s decision to use force against Taiwan will be based on a mixture of factors, including hard-nosed realist cost-benefit calculations, as well as colored assessments distorted by elements of nationalism and moral righteousness.

Reduced to its starkest terms, China’s policy aim is to secure the return of Taiwan or at the very least the prevention of its permanent and formal separation from China. If Beijing believes that Washington will not respond forcefully, the Chinese leadership will use force to stop Taiwan from making any move that will enable it to assert its formal existence as a nation state separate from China. With a population of 23 million and its resource base, it would be unrealistic, or very nearly impossible, to expect Taiwan to defend itself without external support against a rising power of 1.3 billion people separated by less than 100 miles of ocean. For Taiwan to stand any chance of repulsing a determined and full-scale Chinese attack it will need the support of the United States, not least to keep its armed forces supplied with vital materiel and keep open Taiwan’s sea and air links to the wider world.

The rational calculus for war

China’s decision to use force will depend highly upon its assessment of the US military, and above all, the US political capacity to respond and its commitments elsewhere, particularly in Iraq and Korea in the foreseeable future. Despite the obvious interest Beijing has in preventing itself from being drawn into a crisis on the Korean peninsula, one should not see Beijing’s policy toward North Korean nuclear brinkmanship simply in terms of a passive broker for peace.² For Beijing, the North Korean issue is intricately linked to its core external relations and strategic security agenda, namely its relationship with the US over Taiwan. After all, China would almost certainly have taken Taiwan had there not been the Korean War in 1950. It is important to remember that Beijing does have leverage in Pyongyang, and has the scope to persuade the North Koreans to increase or reduce tension, albeit only to a limited extent. Therefore, should Beijing choose to use force against Taiwan, it may be able to persuade Pyongyang that this can be done with mutual benefits. In fact the latter may even be persuaded to help by further increasing tension to a crisis level. If Beijing were to adopt such an approach, its intention would be to create confusion in order to deter the US from responding quickly and effectively to its moves against Taiwan. The objective would be to allow China to pressure Taiwan into submission, before it attempts to repair some of the damage done to Sino-US relations by getting Pyongyang involved.

Also critical is Beijing’s assessment of its forces’ ability to coerce Taipei to enter negotiations for unification before US forces could reach Taiwan. As will be shown in Chapters 4–9, Beijing’s current military doctrine focuses, not on a massive amphibious assault, but on the “decapitation” of the political and military leadership of Taiwan. This is meant to be an attempt at a limited use of force. It may involve well coordinated ballistic missile strikes (see Chapter 4, by Pollack), and/or attacks by special forces (see Chapter 5, by Fisher) against carefully chosen leadership and command and control targets in Taiwan. Such an operation could increase its coercive value through the mobilization of the elite 15th Airborne Corps, as well as the East Sea and the South Sea Fleets, which can be easily detected by the Taiwanese and Americans. The aim then is to force Taipei’s government, which may no longer be headed by Chen, to enter into negotiations on Beijing’s terms. A key underlying assumption in Beijing is that US intervention. and with it an escalation into a full-scale war, could be pre-empted if such negotiations began quickly.

This in turn implies that China will not use force against Taiwan if it knows for certain the US would intervene massively (see Chapter 2, by Yu). US deterrence against Chinese designs over Taiwan was one of the most successful cases of such a policy during the Cold War. However, this no longer applies, as the US policy has gradually been shifted from deterrence against China to “dual deterrence.” As Richard Bush explains in Chapter 3, Washington now also needs to deter a democratic Taiwan from taking steps that may lead China to resort to force. The result is a necessary degree of ambiguity over how the US would respond to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. This means that the scope for miscalculation for Taipei is no longer negligible. Hence, it was necessary for George W.Bush, the US President most sympathetic to Taiwan since Dwight D.Eisenhower, to rebuke publicly President Chen Shui-bian in December 2003, when Chen appeared to embark on a course that could cause China to resort to force.

If scope for miscalculation by Taipei in fact exists, this applies even more to Beijing. After all Washington has greater room to speak bluntly and exert direct pressure on Taipei than it does on Beijing. Taiwan’s ultimate dependence on the US for its survival as a state means that should it take steps that may lead to a Chinese attack, Taipei would be exposed to very strong and direct pressure from Washington. Chen Shui-bian’s backtracking from his expansive electoral rhetoric, over the replacement of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution by referendum in his second presidential inauguration speech, in May 2004, demonstrated the effectiveness of US pressure.

While it is US policy to pre-empt a war across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese government can easily misjudge US intentions and miscalculate US capacity. Chinese policies are not made on the basis of reality, but rather on assessments of it. In China the Taiwan issue is seen through the prism of morality, the future of the Chinese state and national honor, and growing resentment against Taiwan’s incremental approach to asserting independence. Even as the military balance is steadily shifting in China’s favor, its assessments of outside reactions to China’s “righteous” use of force against Taiwan are colored accordingly.³ Distortions of reality will not be adequately corrected by Chinese diplomats stationed overseas, including in the US. The Chinese bureaucratic system suffers from an inherent weakness. It is that diplomats are required not to contradict senior leaders even when reporting views they have collected and collated in their diplomatic missions.⁴ Given that policies related to Taiwan and the US are two of the most important issues for the Chinese leadership, once it has made its basic view known, it is highly unlikely that Chinese diplomats in Washington, or elsewhere, will risk contradicting it, irrespective of their private views.

Chinese assessments of the US capability to respond to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait are tied to their evaluations of how over-stretched US armed forces are elsewhere, in particular, in Iraq in the foreseeable future. The immense problems the US Government and Army face in Iraq may also lead the Chinese to conclude that, even if the US Navy and Air Force have undiminished capabilities in the Pacific Command, the American political will to interfere militarily has been gravely sapped. In any event the Chinese also have scope to limit the capacity of the US Pacific Command to help Taiwan defend itself by, for example, increasing tension in the Korean Peninsula. In short, the idea of a post-Iraq syndrome against overseas military adventure emerging in the US over the next few years, may lead some in Beijing to conclude that a rare opportunity for the resolution of the Taiwan issue may soon present itself.

If such an assessment were to be taken seriously by China’s top leaders, it would be as dangerous as General Xiong Guangkai, career military intelligence officer and the current deputy Chief of the General Staff, taking the view that he doubted the US would “trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”⁵ Equally significant is the often repeated comment by serving senior Chinese officers, that the US’s determination to help defend Taiwan would dissipate if the Chinese were to take out an American aircraft carrier, suggesting a lack of understanding of the nature of American society and people. The resolve that characterized the US response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor does not appear to have been taken on board by General Xiong, or most Chinese officials who have expressed such a view. In evaluating the American will to help Taiwan defend itself, the question is whether the Chinese will take into account how fully the US sees the “war against terrorism” as a long-term struggle, and that it is highly unlikely to refuse to defend American values and the democratic way of life (which include supporting democracy in Taiwan, the most successful American protégé since 1945).

A different, but no less dangerous Chinese miscalculation may involve their misjudgment of the Taiwanese determination and capacity to resist after a successful Chinese “decapitation” operation. A Chinese commentator has already suggested that Chen Shui-bian’s bitter and controversial electoral victory, in March 2004, has gravely undermined the credibility of his administration and the loyalty of Taiwan’s armed forces in defending such a government. For Beijing, if this in fact holds true, it means it is the right time to threaten war and force Chen to accept “the One China principle.”⁶ Such a view, however, reflects a complete failure on the part of China to understand the dynamics of politics in Taiwan. With a sense of local identity steadily rising, Taiwan’s president cannot afford to be seen as capitulating to Beijing’s pressure. Equally, this growing sense of identity is more likely to solidify than to disintegrate if the survival of Taiwan, as a society, is being threatened by a successful Chinese “decapitation” operation. Whoever takes over the reins of political leadership in Taipei, after such an eventuality, would come under tremendous domestic pressure to lead Taiwan to resist, particularly if the prospect of US aid continues to exist. Taiwan as a whole might be deeply shocked by such a surprise attack, but its people and its citizen soldiers would most probably rally around and defend their homeland. There is nothing that would provoke a stronger sense of “the evil them” bullying “the heroic us” in Taiwan, than a successful “decapitation” operation by the Chinese.

The very dynamics of Taiwanese politics means that even the limited use of force by Beijing to pressure Taipei to “rein in at the brink of the precipice” will be counter-productive.⁷ As long as the Taiwanese are not seen to have brought about such a turn of events themselves, the US will, more likely than not, come to Taiwan’s aid, particularly if it does not necessitate the dispatch of ground troops. Thus, any miscalculation on the part of Beijing that may lead to use of limited force against Taiwan, will most likely result in an unintended escalation toward a war involving both China and the US.

To understand how the Chinese assess the costs and benefits of using force against Taiwan, it is necessary to examine systematically and objectively whether the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can deploy missiles and unconventional forces to carry out a “decapitation” operation, seize control of the air and command of the sea, organize and sustain an amphibious assault, and otherwise provide the infrastructure to support a full scale attack against Taiwan. The rest of this volume does just this. It will also examine the diplomatic, political, and economic costs that China will have to pay for attacking Taiwan, before drawing a few conclusions on what the key drivers behind relations across the Taiwan Strait are.

China’s capacity to attack

In considering a Taiwan Strait war scenario, the first issue that comes to most people’s mind is the threat of China’s ever growing missile force. Its 706 missiles appear to be a capability directed primarily for use against Taiwan.⁸ To put this threat in context, the destructive power of the 706 guided missiles amounts roughly to 706 other precision guided munitions, such as the Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), which the Americans used a lot more on a daily basis during the assault phase of the 2003 Iraq War. However, if they were used against a very limited number of selected political leaders, as well as command and control targets, for a “decapitation” operation, they could be highly effective in causing the confusion and damage hoped for by Beijing’s policy planners. Equally, if the missiles were used as a weapon of terror against the civilian population or commercial shipping, their impact, and thus value, is disproportionate to their actual destructive power. Indeed, these two tactical deployments of the missiles are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined to ensure China’s desired result will be achieved. It is the wide scope and flexibility that this missile capability poses that makes them a weapon for all seasons (see Chapter 4, by Pollack).

Given that Taiwan’s defense establishment has long prepared itself against all eventualities in a Chinese attack, many of the key command and control centers are located and well protected against missile attacks or air strikes. This means that any serious pl...

Table of contents

• ASIAN SECURITY STUDIES
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 DRIVERS BEHIND THE USE OF FORCE
• Part I POLICY FRAMEWORK
• Part II CHINA’S CAPACITY TO USE FORCE
• Part III THE COST OF A WAR TO CHINA
• INDEX