Tensions between China and Taiwan and its allies have been mounting in recent months over Taiwan's assertion of independence and China's insistence that Taiwan is part of one China. In addition, China's increasingly bellicose claims to territories occupied by its neighbors (e.g., Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam) is fueling counteractions (e.g., the Quad pact involving Japan, the U.S., India and Australia).
Now, Reuters reports that Taiwan has initiated a secretive project to build eight submarines in Taiwan by 2025 with the aid of the arms industries in several countries:
".... as China under President Xi Jinping steps up its military intimidation of Taiwan, an array of foreign submarine-technology vendors, with the approval of their governments, are aiding a secretive program to build subs in Taiwan. Taipei has stealthily sourced technology, components and talent from at least seven nations to help it build an underwater fleet with the potential to exact a heavy toll on any Chinese attack, a Reuters investigation has found.
Taipei’s chief foreign weapons supplier, the United States, has provided key technology, including combat-system components and sonars. But assistance is coming from far beyond America.
Defense companies from the United Kingdom, which like America operates a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic missile and attack submarines, have provided crucial support." (our emphasis)
While the project began in 2017, it's only recently that the essential participation of foreign companies has been disclosed.
In response, China demanded that the foreign governments supporting the project should cease their activities and "stop supporting the 'Taiwan independence' secessionist forces." Taiwan has tried to avoid involving foreign governments directly by approaching companies and ordering equipment and services, who then get export agreements to provide the equipment piecemeal. That certainly won't stop China from reprisals against countries themselves, as they have already done with Germany for German companies providing key equipment to the project.
China clearly sees this as an exacerbation of tensions by a rebellious Taiwanese government, and may choose to escalate not only its rhetoric but its economic and military response. That's the last thing that's needed in that volatile region. But there are times you just have to stand up to a bully.
(Image: Japan Times)
4 comments:
Right. No expansionist fascist dictatorship has ever been successfully stopped by appeasement. We saw what that leads to after Austria and the Sudetenland in the 1930s. You stop regimes like that by standing up to them and deterring them.
Ideally, Taiwan would be building its own independent strategic nuclear forces (and something like that may be in the works clandestinely, for all we know). Israel has shown that even for a small country, that does work at preventing attacks by neighboring states. But until then, anything that can raise the price of an invasion is a step in the right direction.
Infidel -- Hopefully China will get the message at some point that their aggressive tactics are a dead end, not only with Taiwan, but with their other neighbors.
How much of a deterrent would a handful of submarines really be should China decide to invade? I think China has the largest navy in the world, in terms of actual hulls in the water and, just guessing here, there'd probably be airborne elements to such an invasion. Just wondering.
When people say China has the "largest navy in the world" in terms of number of ships, they're practically counting things you could play with in the bathtub. Here is what China's civil engineering looks like. I wouldn't put my money on the quality of their military technology being much better. It's a junk nation behind a façade of bluster.
Submarines could be a formidable deterrent to a seaborne invasion if they were able to inflict really massive casualties upon ships en route. China's disastrous one-child policy has created a nation of only children whose parental generation is extremely allergic to casualties. Even the Beijing regime has to be careful of provoking too much outrage among its subjects.
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