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The recent crisis between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (whose trigger was the official visit made by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, to the Government of Taiwan, rightly understood by the communist government in Beijing as a support to the independence movement now presided over by the progressive Dr. Tsai Ing-wen) requires a deeper analysis.
Why does the communist government in Beijing insist on carrying out large-scale military exercises (live-fire missile launches, movement of warships, and fighter-bomber planes) over the Taiwan Strait, an area known as the tacit middle or border zone-separating the two nations?
The answer goes beyond the historical rivalry following the triumph of the Communist revolutionaries who overthrew the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek government in October 1949, the year in which the two governments were formally separated: that of Beijing under the control of Mao Zedong and that of Taipei presided over by Kai-shek.
The real reason for the PRC’s increased interest in Taiwan is primarily geopolitical and, to some extent, a mixture of domestic politics on the part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucrats with a good dose of political personalism on the part of the current Mandarin tyrant, Xi Jinping.
Regarding the geopolitical interest of the PRC in Taiwan, there is the imperialist strategy of the Asian giant to impose itself as the great computer of the vast and strategic Indo-Pacific region, therefore, a small island so close to China is a challenge that Beijing cannot afford. Even more so when they show splendid growth and boom not only economically, but also socially, framed within a political system centered on freedom: free market and democracy, the opposite of what prevails in the PRC. Therefore, it constitutes in itself a powerful threat to the CCP, ergo, its government, with all that this means.
Further, we observe the Chinese interest in breaking the free navigation of the international community in the waters and airspace of the Taiwan Strait, ignoring the status quo of an international maritime and air route, negatively affecting the free transit of international civil and commercial operations that take place in that space.
Additionally, an aspect that has been mentioned very little, but no less true or plausible, is that with the realization of such military exercises, a replica of the Government Palace of Taiwan was made at least 5 years ago. This structure, verified by satellite images, is used by the People’s Liberation Army at the Combined Tactical Military Training Base to train its troops in the storming of the Taiwanese government headquarters. The evidence is conclusive, the PRC is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan, and such preparations also involve cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, and economic coercion, hindering the normal development of the island’s activities and suffocating the morale of the Taiwanese population.
Finally, there is solid evidence that the real intention of the PRC military forces in the Taiwan Strait is to use the “A2/AD” missiles due to purely geo-strategic ambitions, such as its project to alter the current status quo of the Indo-Pacific and link the so-called “China Seas”, the East and South Seas through the Taiwan Strait, thus converting that entire area as “internal waters” of the PRC. The free world, therefore, should not look at Taiwan as a mere dispute between two countries, but as the PRC’s great threat to the security and peace not only of the Indo-Pacific but of the whole world.
Nahem Reyes is a PhD in history from the Andrés Bello Catholix University and associate member of the American Studies Center of the Central University of Venezuela. // Nahem Reyes es doctor en Historia de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello y miembro asociado del Centro de Estudios de América de la Universidad Central de Venezuela.