China wants to build a high-speed rail line to Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing intends to subjugate, but officials in Taipei sound less than enthusiastic about the idea.
“If the mainland side cannot effectively improve its internal economic problems, the relevant measures of integrating and benefiting Taiwan will be unrealistic,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said Thursday, per the South China Morning Post.
WHY ARE SO MANY HIGH-LEVEL CHINESE OFFICIALS DISAPPEARING
Chinese officials touted a rail link as “a solid foundation for promoting infrastructure connectivity across the Taiwan Strait," with state media adding that the regime plans to build "an expressway and a high-speed railway connecting Beijing to Taiwan ... by 2035." Taiwanese authorities are moving towards “gradually restoring healthy and orderly” travel between China and the island, but military strategists around the world regard the sheer logistical difficulty of an invasion across the strait as one of Taiwan’s chief protections against Chinese Communist rule, and they don’t want to make it seem any easier.
“The Taiwan Strait is a natural barrier between Mainland China and Taiwan,” Taiwanese defense officials noted in a defense report released this week. “We will continue standing staunchly to defend our national sovereignty and ensure the integrity of our territorial waters, lands, and airspace.”
Chinese Communist officials have claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since their victory in the Chinese Civil War, but they have never ruled the island, which has functioned as the last bastion of the nationalist government driven from Beijing by Chairman Mao Zedong’s forces. The United States maintained its Second World War-era alliance with the Republic of China government on the island until 1979, when Jimmy Carter cut ties with Taipei in order to move the U.S. embassy to Beijing, as part of a wider diplomatic initiative to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist regime.
Congress directed the president to maintain close unofficial relations with Taiwan, including by providing military equipment to help Taiwanese authorities fend off a Chinese Communist invasion. And so Taiwan has loomed as a potential flash point for decades, one rendered all the more dangerous in recent years by China’s efforts to build a military capable of winning a war against the United States.
“China has ... their policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint — maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that — [it is] an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because ... the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said this week. “There will come a point, probably in the not-too-distant future, where China’s military strength in that region far exceeds U.S. military strength in that region ... [and then] force will be used to incorporate Taiwan into China.”
Chinese forces have harried Taiwan with an array of fighter jet sorties and other drills, including an exercise this week that reportedly featured "at least 143 PLA warplanes and 56 warships." Yet Musk’s assessment drew an angry response from Taipei. “Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the PRC and certainly not for sale,” Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu wrote on social media.
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That contretemps was tied to Musk’s remarks in particular, but Taiwanese defense leaders implicitly acknowledged the need to make the case for Taiwan’s importance to the U.S. ability to counter Chinese Communist military power.
“Geographically, Taiwan is a linchpin to contain the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) eastward maritime power expansion to the Pacific,” Taiwanese defense officials noted in a defense report released this week. “Taiwan is a linchpin at the First Island Chain. It plays a key strategic role in integrated deterrence and Indo-Pacific defense formed by the U.S. and its allies. is a linchpin at the First Island Chain. It plays a key strategic role in integrated deterrence and Indo-Pacific defense formed by the U.S. and its allies.”