XI JINPING CHALLENGES TRUMP TO BATTLE OVER TAIWAN

It is clear from President Xi’s New Year speech on Taiwan that he believes that PLA is battle ready to unify Taiwan with Mainland China by force.

During the first fiveyear term of former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began its program of “Anti-access Area Denial” (A2AD) against United States forces operating in the vicinity of Taiwan (otherwise known as the Republic of China). The helplessness of the PLA Navy to deter the two US Navy carrier fleets that sailed across the Taiwan Straits in 1996 resulted in the realisation within the Central Military Commission (CMC), then headed by Jiang Zemin, that the technological capability of the forces under its command was comprehensively inferior to those mobilised by Washington. After a careful study of needs and capabilities, plans were therefore begun to be implemented from 2004 onwards to (a) bolster anti-satellite capability, (b) build up anti-ship ballistic missile capacity, and (c) ramp up cyber and other offensive modes. The aim was to ensure that the PLA air, land, space, cyber and sea forces acting in unison had the capability to sink two carrier fleets, if called upon to do so. Once such a capacity got acquired, the generals in Beijing believed that Washington would not dare to intervene on the side of Taipei, should there be a cross-straits conflict. The growing confidence of PLA’S officer corps has been increased by the victory of the Prc-leaning Kuo Min Tang (KMT) in the justconcluded local body elections in Taiwan. The KMT inflicted major defeats on the Us-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). In the capital city of Taipei, the China-friendly physician, Ko Wen je retained his Mayoralty. This has given traction to the belief that the overwhelming majority of the Taiwanese people, including units of the armed forces, would be bystanders during a PLA attack on the island, rather than actively resist the force.

On New Year, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) outed that confidence when he gave a speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act in the US Congress. The Act implies, but does not explicitly assure that the US would undertake active military measures to deter, or when necessary, defeat an armed attack by the PLA on Taiwan. In Xi’s speech, the most explicit of any made by a Chinese leader since the days of Mao Zedong, the President of the PRC gave notice that his patience was wearing out in the matter of the unification of the ROC (Taiwan) with the PRC, and that unless the political leadership in Taipei indicated an acceptance of an improved version of the One Country Two Systems model adopted in the case of the 1997 Hong Kong handover from Britain to China, military force would not, as in the past, be a last resort. Armed force would be brought forward as almost the first option to be considered and carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership. Xi made it clear that the longstanding formula of the “92 Consensus” that had served as cover for the status quo across the straits needed to be reformulated. Instead of both sides having different interpretations of what “One China” meant, there was room only for a single interpretation, which