Why is the Chinese military sending so many planes near Taiwan?
On October 1, the Chinese military sent a batch of 38 warplanes to bother Taiwan. Over the next four days, Taiwan says that the Chinese military deployed about 150 aircraft into its air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, an area that extends past Taiwan’s airspace within which aircraft still have to identify themselves. Taiwan’s defense minister called the provocation the “ most serious ” in 40 years. While this was a record number of incursions in such a short time frame — the Chinese military sent 56 planes on Monday alone — it fits into a larger trend of bubbling tensions in the region. According to the Taiwanese government, China has sent more than 600 incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ so far in 2021, up from a total of 380 in 2020. China’s provocations underscore a long history, and maybe a more complicated geopolitical future. Taiwan, known officially as the Republic of China, was established in 1949 when US-backed Chinese nationalists fled after the Communist Party took control of mainland China. While the US has only formal ties with the People’s Republic of China and has recognized it as the “sole legal government” of China since 1979, Washington has also maintained informal economic and securities ties with Taiwan. This was always an uneasy status quo, especially as the Chinese Community Party has never abandoned the idea of bringing Taiwan back under its full control and reunifying China. In the meantime, Taiwan itself forged its own identity and economic power on the world stage, and has been, since the 1990s, a democracy. Of course, the “ strategic competition ” (as we’re calling it now) between the US and China has put the region in focus, making the question of Taiwan’s future more urgent. Chinese President Xi Jinping has tried to consolidate power and bring restive parts of the country — the Xinjiang region, Hong Kong — under his control. The question now is: Is Taiwan next? And if it is, what happens now? China’s warplanes are forcing officials and experts to think about these challenges. The provocations are an effort by the Chinese government to reiterate to a global audience its view of Taiwan as essential to China’s national security interests. Internationally, it’s also a response to the US’s own coalition-building the region, said Raymond Kuo, an expert on international security and East Asia who will be a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. [Author’s note: Kuo’s views are his own and do not reflect the positions of the RAND Corporation.] “A lot of the countries in the region — Japan, South Korea, Philippines, probably — they look at Taiwan as a litmus test for US commitment and Chinese assertiveness, which just puts China’s back up,” Kuo said. Kuo has worked in foreign policy for years, including with Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the left-leaning and typically more pro-Taiwanese independence party. Vox spoke with him about what’s going on in the region, why the Chinese military is carrying out these flyovers, and what it means for Taiwan and US-China relations. A transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below. It seems the big headline is that China’s military is flying an unusually large number of planes over Taiwan’s “air identification defense zone.” What’s going on there? There have been an unusually large number of incursions this year. In the five days [starting October 1], there was an unusually high concentration of them, as well. The important thing to recognize is that they’re entering the air identification defense zone, the AIDZ, but not Taiwanese airspace. Under international law, your airspace extends 12 nautical miles outside your land boundary, for lack of a better term. AIDZ — I think about 20 countries have declared AIDZ — is, essentially, when you enter this zone, we want you to identify yourself to give our air defenses more time to figure out who you are. So [China’s military] has been entering in this southwestern corner, they’ve been vectoring around Taiwan, so kind of parallel to the Taiwanese territorial waters and airspace. But where it used to be intel planes, now it’s bombers escorted by fighters and electronic warfare planes. It’s much more about how, “We [the Chinese military] have the ability to launch a large strike, we can do it successively over many days. And we’re not just using strike aircraft like bombers, but also supporting them with the fighters that you need to defend those bombers, as well as electronic warfare planes to jam signals.” What is the Chinese government trying to accomplish with these incursions? We’ve got a couple different signaling audiences. There’s Chinese domestic politics. National Day was October 1. It’s often a day for the Chinese government to emphasize their nationalist credentials and project hope for the future about reunifying China, whether that means Taiwan or suppressing the Uyghurs or that kind of thing. There’s a Taiwanese politics component, specifically an attempt to demoralize the public that China is stronger and you can’t win. The quote-unquote pragmatic choice is just to unify with us. Those tend to backfire. In 1996, China launched a couple missiles across the Taiwan Strait. It ended up — there was an election in Taiwan at the time — boosting the less pro-China candidate. And recently, with the protests and the crackdown in Hong Kong, going into this most recent election the current president, Tsai Ing-wen [of the pro-Taiwan independence Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP], was looking a little bit shaky, especially among youth. But when all that happened in Hong Kong, it was like, “Nope, we don’t want this to happen to Taiwan.” It also feeds into Taiwanese party politics. The Kuomintang Party [Taiwan’s other major political party, which favors closer ties with mainland China] talking point is to say things like, “Well, the DPP can’t stabilize Taiwanese-Chinese relations.
