China announced the end of its unprecedented military maneuvers around Taiwan on Wednesday, but also said it would maintain constant pressure on the autonomous island whose absorption is one of the priorities of the communist dictatorship.
The exercises were a response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to the island last Tuesday (2) and Wednesday (3). It was the first visit of its kind, in which the Democrat reaffirmed American support for island democracy in 25 years.
People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command spokesman Shi Yi said the actions “successfully completed various tasks, and effectively tested the troops’ integrated combat capabilities.”
At the same time, Shi suggested that military pressure will now be, to stay with the pandemic cliché, the new normal. “The forces will keep an eye on changes in the Taiwan Strait, maintain training and combat readiness, organize combat readiness patrols in their direction, and resolutely defend national sovereignty and integrity.”
In other words, air raids and movements of warships could become a constant, to remind Taipei of Xi Jinping’s government’s determination, at least until the Communist Party congress that will reinstate the leader for a new term in November.
A clear sign was the record, according to the Taiwanese press, of the movement of fighter jets in the strait that separates Taiwan from the mainland on Wednesday. At least 17 of them invaded the so-called Median Line, which unofficially separates territorial spaces into sea and air at the site.
Raids were a constant and escalated since the start of the Cold War 2.0 between the US and China in 2017, but the game has been taken to another level in the last week.
The Chinese trained the blockade and invasion of the island, focusing on the logistics of supply lines in case of war, in addition to naval air strike actions. Taiwan, meanwhile, also carried out exercises with live ammunition, raising the risk of an accident leading to an escalation.
The US has supported Taipei ambiguously since it recognized China in 1979, implicitly accepting that Taiwan belongs to Beijing. But they also signed a pact to supply weapons and promise to intervene in the event of an invasion.
The Joe Biden administration had been keeping up the pressure on the Chinese, putting the Indo-Pacific as its strategic priority and strengthening regional alliances. The Ukraine War messed that up, not least because Vladimir Putin’s Russia is Xi’s biggest political and military ally.
Biden has already admonished Xi not to get excited about the Ukrainian case and invade Taiwan, even if they are different contexts. The American leaked that he admonished Pelosi not to go to Taipei, but it is not known if this was just a diversion, as the challenge may well fall among voters on the eve of the November parliamentary election in which the Democratic Party is expected to lose ground to the Republican in Congress.
It may be, but so far all that Pelosi has managed is to bring regional tension to its highest level since the so-called Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995 and 1996. Chinese to shape a more dramatic term. Relations with the US are at their worst level in years.
That doesn’t interest Xi, given the worrying state of the Chinese economy, torn apart by the leader’s Covid zero policy lockdowns and the crisis in its housing market. The economic interconnection with the US makes the cost of any conflict, apart from the risk of military embarrassment, prohibitive.
The same can be said more specifically in Taiwan, which has its biggest economic partner on the mainland. Despite the harsh rhetoric against Beijing, President Tsai Ing-wen has never declared the island’s independence, for example.
On Wednesday, she criticized a leadership of the main opposition party, the Kuomintang. Andrew Hsia traveled to China to participate in a trade promotion round. This signals that there is dissent in relation to the conduct of relations and real fear for the drumbeat of war around the island.
