Ukraine conflict makes Taiwan nervous – but the risk to China could be too great

A tweet by Florida Senator Marco Rubio on Thursday about a large-scale power outage in Taiwan with an unknown cause sparked instant online alarm that China could be carrying out a cyber-attack.

It was a message that rattled US Twitter users rather than people in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, who were more concerned about traffic lights going down than their overbearing neighbour across the Taiwan Strait. The authorities later clarified it had been a regular equipment malfunction.

The online jitters are understandable given the obvious parallels that are being drawn between Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and China’s own designs on Taiwan, a democratic island of 23.5 million that it claims as its own. Many fear Beijing could be emboldened by Russia’s aggression to make its own move.

Both Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who put on a show of force against Nato expansion and hailed “unprecedented ties” at the Olympics, have leaned on nationalistic arguments to justify their authoritarian goals to seize their neighbours.

Mr Xi has refused to rule out annexing Taiwan by force and has stepped up military exercises near the island while flying more than 1,000 warplanes, including nuclear bombers, near its sovereign airspace in the past year.

But many experts have ruled out an imminent invasion by China, arguing the risks of failure remain too great for Mr Xi, who does not want to damage the Chinese dream of “national rejuvenation” or ruin his country’s economic rise through protracted conflict and punitive sanctions.

Dr Oriana Skylar Mastro, from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, predicted Beijing would not be opportunistic about an invasion while the world was distracted by Ukraine.

“I think when they move on Taiwan is shaped by domestic political factors and whether it is good timing for Xi Jinping and his career,” she said.

Another factor at play is China’s own military readiness. Despite now boasting the world's largest navy, the largest standing army and the third-biggest air force, nuclear-armed China’s forces remain untested in battle.

Russia’s stuttering advance into Ukraine in the face of heavy local resistance, and an increasingly united front on global sanctions, has no doubt given Beijing pause for thought.

When it comes to how the United States, Taiwan’s biggest arms supplier, would respond in a crisis, the parallels are also harder to draw.

Some believe Russia’s attack will only strengthen US resolve to protect Taiwan as it shifts its foreign policy priorities to the Indo-Pacific to counter the rise of China.

In 2020, Taiwan was the US’ ninth largest trade partner in 2020, while Ukraine was 67^th. Taiwan dominates the global supply of semiconductor chips, and its strategic position on the so-called “first island chain” is integral to Washington’s Indo-Pacific policy and to denying China open access to the Pacific coastline.

While Washington maintains a position of “strategic ambiguity,” meaning that it will not disclose whether it would defend Taiwan in a worst-case scenario, Dr Mastro said her interactions with Beijing officials revealed “they think we will try to intervene.”

But the viral social media slogan “Today, Ukraine, tomorrow, Taiwan!” still holds weight.

Top US and Taiwanese defence officials have publicly warned China will be capable of a full-scale military takeover within three to four years.

“I think there is a high likelihood it’s going to happen but not because of Ukraine,” said Dr Mastro.

Ian Easton, a China affairs analyst with the Project 2049 Institute and author of “The Chinese Invasion Threat,” disagrees on the influence of the Ukraine crisis on the timing.

“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has broken the long spell of peace between nations. We now live in a world of state-on-state warfare. What’s worse, we now live in a world where a peaceful democracy can be invaded and other nations, including the United States, fail to respond until it is too late to stop the war,” he said.

“Clearly the assumptions American leaders had about deterrence and war prevention have been falsified. This puts Taiwan in a perilous position.”

Taiwan’s best hope was if Ukraine could pull off a David versus Goliath defeat of Russia, making Putin’s invasion disastrous for his regime, he said.

“But if Ukraine falls, Xi Jinping could be encouraged and emboldened. He could order an attack on Taiwan sooner than most have anticipated.”

Timescales aside, the inhumane destruction of Ukrainian cities has sharpened Taiwan’s focus on how to defend itself.

Its defence ministry said this week it plans to more than double its yearly missile production to close to 500, under an extra $8.6 billion five-year military budget approved in 2021.

Admiral Lee Hsi-min, chief of general staff from 2017 to 2019, said Taiwan should learn from the battlefields of Ukraine and beef up its “asymmetric warfare” strategy and prioritise defence spending on small, mobile, survivable weapons to inflict maximum damage on an invading force.

Taiwan, like Ukraine, is vastly outgunned by its powerful rival.

“You cannot compete with them fighter to fighter, ship to ship, tank to tank. You need to think differently in an innovative and asymmetrical way,” he said. “If you defend everywhere then you lose everywhere. You have to forecast key points, key areas, key moments.”

Wu Tzu-li, a retired naval captain and now analyst at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defence and Security Research, added that Taiwan, like Ukraine, must focus on how to limit damage and quickly recover from the first strike.

“We need to strengthen passive defence measures like protecting [military] bases, and critical infrastructure…so that after the first strike we still have the capability to fight back,” he said.

The Taiwanese admired the Ukrainians sacrifice in their fight for freedom, he said.

“People think it’s better not to fight, but if it comes then we need to fight really well.”

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