By Ben Blanchard, Yimou Lee and Angie Teo
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Beijing has unveiled a new tactic on Taiwan, the democratic island it claims as its own, officials and experts say: large-scale drills with no fanfare to normalise a heightened military presence and let the U.S. know that China can act whenever it wants.
For four days this week, Taiwan went on alert in response to what it said was China’s largest massing of naval forces in three decades around Taiwan and in the East and South China Seas.
China’s military said nothing until Friday when it quoted ancient Chinese tactician Sun Tzu’s Art of War, a favourite of the communist republic’s founder Mao Zedong.
“Just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions,” the defence ministry said, a cryptic statement that neither confirmed nor denied that Beijing had been holding military exercises.
The initial silence was a departure from China’s past practice of unleashing a massive propaganda push to coincide with war games around the island.
A senior Taiwan security official this week termed China’s activities as “drills that dare not speak their name”.
China’s “Joint Sword-2024B” war games in October were accompanied by a flood of military and state media graphics and videos lambasting Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, a person Beijing denounces as a “separatist”. One animation caricatured Lai with devil-like pointed ears.
Lai rejects Beijing’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan, saying only the island’s people can decide their future.
Security sources had expected China to launch new drills to coincide with Lai’s trip this month to the Pacific, where he stopped over in Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam. Beijing opposes any foreign engagements for Taiwan leaders.
“I clearly believe this is the beginning of the ‘mid-stage’ of normalisation,” Chen Kuan-ting, a lawmaker for Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who sits on parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee, told Reuters.
“Neighbouring countries have to be aware that if they don’t respond accordingly, they themselves may become the next target.”
Neither the United States nor Japan, Taiwan’s two most important security partners, have confirmed the scale of China’s military movements, although both expressed concern. Taiwan signalled late Thursday the activities had wound down by closing its emergency response centre.
One fear Taiwan has is of Chinese drills suddenly turning into an actual attack, and a Taiwan intelligence official said this week China was trying to wrongfoot them by keeping mum.
“By not announcing the drills in advance, they want to lower our alertness and catch everyone off guard when they keep appearing around Taiwan,” senior defence ministry intelligence officer Hsieh Jih-sheng told reporters.
“CONTROL THE FIRST ISLAND CHAIN”
Analysts say that Beijing’s activities, conducted in near silence and followed by an opaque statement are meant to create confusion. “What’s changed here is the scale of the exercise and lack of clarity from China about what was involved,” said Drew Thompson, a former U.S. Department of Defense official and now a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
“This only underscores the lack of certainty of China’s intentions.”
China has over the last five years sent its warships and warplanes almost daily into the waters and air space around Taiwan, in what Taiwanese officials see as a creeping effort by China to “normalise” its military presence.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said this time the naval deployment extended across the First Island Chain, which runs from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas.
Its control by China could prevent U.S. forces coming to Taiwan’s assistance in the event of conflict.
“It’s a tricky operation, showing on the one hand their dissatisfaction with Taiwan, and on the other showing the U.S. and its allies that it has military muscle, flying the flag, to show their ability to control the First Island Chain,” said Su Tzu-yun, a research fellow at Taiwan’s top military think tank, the Institute for National Defence and Security Research.
A regional security diplomat said the lack of any announcement ahead of time signalled the normalisation of war simulations around Taiwan.
“China seems to be more concerned with preventing or delaying an intervention into the First Island Chain, than with controlling the area around Taiwan,” the diplomat said.
“One day they will have exercised all they need and feel fully confident to deal with anything that might occur during their aggression towards Taiwan.”
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard, Yimou Lee and Angie Teo; additional reporting by Greg Torode in Hong Kong. Editing by Saad Sayeed)
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