‘The Chinese want to make sure Taiwan’s pilots are stressed out’

Despite high-level meetings between Chinese and U.S. officials aimed at improving relations, China launched large-scale naval exercises and sent record-breaking numbers of aircraft near Taiwan earlier this month.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense said it detected a “recent new high” of 103 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, with 40 entering Taiwan’s southeastern or southwestern Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) or crossing the strait median line, plus nine People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessels in the area.

Another 27 aircraft and seven vessels were detected in the ADIZ the following day.

As the U.S., South Korea, and Canada held joint drills in the Yellow Sea the previous week, China conducted what observers said were the largest-ever maneuvers with an aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific to date, deploying the Shandong aircraft carrier to conduct joint sea and air training. An additional 20 warships sailed through the Bashi Channel and the Miyako Strait — bodies of water separating Taiwan from the Philippines and Japan, respectively — into the Pacific. Experts said the exercises were likely simulating a blockade.

“China does not just have the equipment. They’re also trying to make their equipment work,” said Kitsch Liao, assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s China Hub. “People only look at this as political theater and that’s not what the Chinese are seeing this as. [Taiwan’s] Han Kuang exercise is a political theater. [China is] serious about this…Theirs is real.”

The PLA has considerably increased military pressure around Taiwan since 2019, but activity has sharply risen since a visit to the island democracy by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August 2022, when China launched large-scale exercises that lasted several days. More large-scale drills followed a meeting between Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文 Cài Yīngwén) and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in April, and Vice President and the recent transit of presidential front-runner William Lai (賴淸德 Lài Qīngdé) through the U.S. in August.

Since last year, crossings of the unofficial median line — which China does not recognize — have become regular occurrences. According to a data set kept by independent researcher Ben Lewis, a total of 1,737 sorties were recorded in Taiwan’s ADIZ in 2022, up from 972 in 2021. Over 1,200 have been recorded in 2023 so far.

“The Chinese are very clearly no longer abiding by the median line. So you could think of this as kind of a rolling demonstration. They do kick off at times of political importance, but you don’t see any of that [with these exercises],” said Raymond Kuo, the director of the Rand Corporation’s Hu Taiwan Policy Initiative.

China’s frequent use of gray-zone tactics — including ADIZ violations, crossings of the median line, and encirclement exercises — to express its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan has caused “a sense of frustration” in the United States, Kuo said.

“There is also caution by the U.S. military to say, ‘Taiwan, don’t rock the boat.’ Because it’s not something that the U.S. can actually respond to,” Kuo said.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense has called on China to stop its “continuous harassment” and “provocative” actions, which undermine the status quo and cause heightened tensions in the strait.

External factors?

The heightened activity around Taiwan comes at a time of increased tensions in the Pacific, and moves by the U.S. and its allies that China views as affronts to its sovereignty. In addition to the joint drills in the Yellow Sea, U.S. and Canadian warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait earlier this month. In late August, the U.S. approved a new $500 million arms sale to Taiwan shortly after Lai’s U.S. stopover.

The Global Times, a nationalist Chinese state-owned tabloid, wrote on September 17 that U.S. actions were “further escalating tensions in China’s surrounding areas.”

After Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅 met with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan earlier this month, China’s readout stressed that “the Taiwan issue is the number-one insurmountable red line in U.S.-China relations” and that the United States “must abide by the three joint communiques and carry out its promise to not support ‘Taiwan independence.’”

Lyle Goldstein, the director of Asia Engagement Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, said the current situation in the strait is “incredibly dangerous.”

“Trying to defuse the tension and just moving military forces around or seeking new bases to me is putting all our eggs in a deterrence basket. I think that’s wrong. I think we need to do more reassurance and try to defuse the situation before it gets out of hand,” he told The Chin Project.

However, China may still be practicing restraint in an attempt to sway the January 2024 presidential election, Goldstein said, and to offer “a subtle reminder that there is this risk of war.” Last week, as large-scale naval exercises took place near Taiwan, China announced plans for “economic integration” in Fujian Province with Taiwan as an important part of “realizing China’s complete reunification.”

The combination of military and economic coercion is commonly used by China against Taiwan, but “might not be as effective as [China] originally intended it to be,” said Crystal Tu (杜貞儀 Dù Zhēnyí), an assistant research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a military think tank in Taiwan.

Recent polls have found growing confidence in Taiwan’s military capabilities as well as support for U.S. military aid to Taiwan.

Weakening Taiwan’s capabilities

Recent flight paths of PLA craft operating around Taiwan show more crossings of the median line as well as a heightened presence in the southeastern ADIZ and some aircraft moving partly around Taiwan’s perimeter, indicating that the PLA may be testing new capabilities or exercises to keep aircraft active for longer periods of time, said Tu.

“It’s put a lot of pressure on our airports. Because of their constant presence on the southwest corners, it might disrupt their scheduled trainings,” Tu said.

In August, the New York Times reported that Taiwan has stopped deploying its own fighter jets each time Chinese flights are detected, “and now does so only when the flights appear more threatening.” In 2020, Taiwan spent nearly 9 percent of its defense budget monitoring Chinese flights and requested an additional $54 million for that purpose earlier this year.

China has over 1,300 combat-ready fighter jets, while Taiwan has just 300. U.S. deliveries of fighter jets and other equipment to Taiwan have lagged, though a recent sale of equipment, which includes infrared search and track systems for F-16 jets, is expected to “greatly improve the effectiveness of air operations.”

“The Chinese want to make sure Taiwan’s pilots are stressed out, tired, that their budgets are spent in this way,” Goldstein said. “If you really want to accomplish surprise against your adversary, you start to do regular sets of large-scale exercises against your adversary and create a false sense of security.”