Tiny Taiwan can outfight Chinese ‘at close range’

On maps and in satellite photographs, the island of Taiwan resembles a plump shrimp beneath the belly of an immense whale. Compared with China, which claims it as its territory, Taiwan has less than 0.4 per cent of the land area and under 2 per cent of the population.

Across the Taiwan Strait, 170,000 Taiwanese troops face more than two million active members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). And yet in a tense military confrontation that has lasted for 73 years, the little shrimp has proved impossible to swallow.

Apart from a few failed attempts to take over its outlying islands, Taiwan has successfully deterred Chinese invasion since 1949, when the nationalist army fled here to establish an independent government after its defeat by the Communists in the civil war.

Since then, however, China’s army has transformed itself into an ever more powerful military force, with aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and hypersonic ballistic missiles. And a fierce debate is taking place about how best the island can continue to guard its freedom from rule by Beijing despite a widening gap in military strength.

The question is more urgent now than ever before — in the past few months the Chinese whale has begun to look more like a circling shark. Since last year, China’s air force has conducted intense aerial manoeuvres close to the air space of Taiwan, which has a democratically elected, self-ruling government.

In August, Beijing reacted to a solidarity visit to Taipei by Nancy Pelosi, the US Congressional speaker, by holding naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait and firing missiles over the island.

On Sunday, the Chinese Communist Party will begin its five-yearly Congress from which President Xi, the party leader, is expected to emerge stronger than ever. The reunification of Taiwan, by force if necessary, is central to Xi’s “China Dream” of national “rejuvenation” by the middle of the century.

One of the top candidates to take over leadership of the Chinese army, General Lin Xiangyang, is commander of the eastern theatre and directed those menacing exercises in August. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the changing position of Washington, has complicated calculations about how an invasion of Taiwan would be launched, how it could be repelled and how the rest of the world would react.

For decades, the solution to Taiwan’s defence seemed straightforward — to acquire the most advanced and powerful weapons to match and defeat the adversary. China might have more personnel, but with high-level training and the most modern equipment — fighter jets, tanks and missiles — Taiwan could hold its own.

The island’s government had a willing supplier of these in the form of the US, which has a complicated policy towards the island. Since 1979, the American government has officially recognised the Communist government of Beijing as the legitimate government of China. US law, though, also obliges it provide Taiwan with the means necessary to its defence.

However, a more recent line of Taiwanese thinking argues that trying to match China is vain and pretentious, and that the island has a more realistic and equally effective strategy in its grasp. “Asymmetric” warfare, also known as the “porcupine” strategy, abandons hope of defeating an invader in air, on land, and on the sea. Instead, it looks to smaller and more modest weapons to make the effort to swallow up the island unbearably difficult and painful.

The recent successes of this approach are Afghanistan and Ukraine, where numerically inferior forces beat off, and turned back, well equipped occupiers using relatively light weapons. The Stinger and Javelin missiles that routed the Russian armoured thrust towards Kyiv, the Neptune missile that sank the flagship Moskva in the Black Sea, and the drones that continue to harry the invaders in Ukraine’s east and south are all cheap, compared with F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks.

The geographical isolation of Taiwan, protected from the mainland by 100 miles of choppy seas, gives it advantages that Ukraine lacks. An asymmetric defence would invest in sea mines, land-based anti-ship missiles and hundreds of small missile-launching boats, rather than big naval ships, to take out amphibious craft as they approach landing sites. It would equip troops with small light vehicles for lightning attacks, and with the weapons for an extended period of guerrilla warfare.

 “When you really have this kind of capability you maximise complication in the enemy’s war plan,” says retired Admiral Lee Hsi-ming who, as Taiwan’s former chief of the general staff, pioneered the asymmetric defence plan.

“Our job is not to completely destroy the enemy — it’s to freeze their invasion plan, to make them think, ‘We are not ready yet’, year after year.”

A Chinese assault on Taiwan could take different forms, including cyberattack, missile bombardment and an extended maritime blockade. But if China intends to bring Taiwan under political control, it must at some point physically occupy the island.

This could prove an immensely costly exercise, in human but also political terms. China has not gone to war since border skirmishes with Vietnam in 1979 and the country has changed since then. “Most Chinese soldiers come from one-child families,” says Michael Cole — an analyst, based in Taipei, with the International Republican Institute. “You’d quickly have thousands of families losing their only son.”

There are those who oppose the porcupine strategy — Admiral Lee retired in 2019. Taiwan’s defence ministry still uses the term asymmetric in its strategy papers but it is leaning towards the acquisition of big, expensive “legacy” weapons systems, such as F-16 fighters and an expensive Taiwanese-built submarine.

Partly this is a genuine difference in strategic approach — against a blockade, for example, forces equipped for asymmetric warfare would be powerless. Big machines of war also impart a psychological comfort that smaller kit does not.

“You can’t embrace asymmetrical warfare just by changing a few weapons systems,” Lee said. “It needs a paradigm shift, you have to totally change your mindset. But when people see an F-16 they feel better. The small drone is not so symbolic.”

The huge unanswered question about the defence against Chinese attack is the role of the US. Washington has previously avoided a commitment to defending the island, a “strategic ambiguity” that was intended to sow doubt in Chinese minds, while discouraging the Taiwanese from openly declaring independence. President Biden, though, has said repeatedly that he would send troops to fight off a Chinese invasion.

Whether the next president will take the same view is unknowable so, in the meantime, Taiwan must prepare to defend itself.

“We don’t have too much time to prepare,” Lee said. “If they can continue to expand their development of military by rapid development of economic power, then sooner or later time will be up.”