Taiwan sounds alarm on Chinese incursions

Taiwan’s military says that China’s People’s Liberation Army has staged 2,076 incursions into its air defense identification zone so far this year. That’s a record – and a worry for Defense Minister Wellington Koo. The sheer volume of these military movements into Taiwan’s self-declared buffer zone blurs the picture as Taipei tries to distinguish peacetime and wartime maneuvers, Koo warned in a press conference Wednesday, after a Chinese aircraft carrier group traversed the island’s northern tip.

“The scale of [China’s military] activity is getting larger and larger, and so it is harder to discern when they might be shifting from training to a large exercise, and from an exercise to war,” Koo told reporters this week. The increased tempo of Chinese military drills is partly a response to the election of Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, who took office in May. Beijing has denounced Lai as a “separatist” for his comments on Taiwan’s relations with the mainland.

There is no evidence that China’s President Xi Jinping intends to launch an invasion of Taiwan anytime soon. He has ordered the PLA to become capable of a successful invasion, but only by 2027, and even that date might prove too ambitious. Xi has recently purged a series of senior defense officials and military officers on corruption charges, setting back military readiness, and China’s president need only look to Ukraine to see what happens when a military operation turns out to be far more costly and complicated than planned. The PLA hasn’t taken part in a shooting war since 1979 and has never launched a major amphibious operation.

But China continues to test its own and Taiwan’s military capabilities, which may obscure the signs of imminent attack one day in the future.