Many Taiwanese I know share this feeling too. Maybe it has to do with past policies, because in the past America would only sell junk to Taiwan. I saw a lot of world war 2 vintage equipment when I was in the army.
We still used AN-VRC77 when America doesn’t even use it anymore.
I do not believe China will invade Taiwan. The first step is to close Taiwanese companies operating in China, stop all trade between the countries, and seize other assets of Taiwanese in China. At that point, they will offer Taiwanese the chance to obtain a Chinese passport by moving to China. This offer will split Taiwanese and force the government to restrict Taiwanese communicating with China.
These actions alone will drastically depress the economy as various foreign companies also will be reluctant to keep investing here. Just to be safe, foreign companies will search for alternative suppliers to replace Taiwan companies. Imports and exports will be more costly as such things as maritime insurance rates increase and imports from other countries must take up the slack to replace the cheaper Chinese goods. Meanwhile, some more wealthy Taiwanese will leave the island.
China can keep on the pressure like this indefinitely until they see a weakened Taiwan. Only then maybe an embargo…but I still do not believe they will invade…simply wait until Taiwan concedes. I do not think any international coalition will make much inroads to deter China.
You’re really complaining about two-way radios that Taiwan has already replaced and that were used by numerous countries until fairly recently?
Your argument is internally inconsistent. If the US game is to force Taiwan to buy shitty old weapons, why has Taiwan’s defense spending been so low for so long?
Another wrinkle here is that the US has been trying to keep the situation stable. Every arms deal has the potential to do more harm than good. Taiwan has purchased arms from Europe (France and Netherlands I believe) in the past but my understanding is that those sales have declined because of China’s pressure. Buying weapons isn’t exactly easy when basically all of the major arms dealing nations don’t even recognize you and are big trading partners with your enemy.
Which raises the question of why Taiwan hasn’t invested more in building a bigger homegrown defense industry. Taiwan is innovative and wealthy. If it wanted to, it could do so. It’s doing more now, but it might be too little too late.
As an American, if I really wanted to take a cynical view of Taiwan, it would be this: Taiwan has been having its cake and eating it too. It has become wealthy in good part because of its close ties with the mainland, but despite knowing the mainland’s position on its sovereignty, has woefully underinvested in its military based on a belief that the US would protect it if China attacked.
Taiwanese people tend to have an unfavorable view of their military, and a majority say they wouldn’t even want to fight if China attacked. Is that America’s fault?
Of course, the US does have a strategic interest in Taiwan. But Taiwan is a democracy. If it wanted to move closer to China and reunification, why have the people been voting to move in a direction that they know increases the tensions with Beijing and could lead to war?
Time to look inward.
PLA is a volunteer army. In the old days it was a way to guarantee you got enough to eat; probably still true for the backwoods peasants that make most of the cannon fodder (as opposed to the educated types that design and produce the advanced weapons or the older officer’s kids that run the graft in the military industries.)
That’s what I was getting at.
There is some truth to what you’re saying. Georgetown recently had a panel where one of Tsai men said that no one would declare independence unless they were insane, and someone from Xi’s alma mater said that China would not attack unless the U.S. were to formally recognize Taiwan. But I have multiple issues with what you’re saying.
Can you explain why the weapons China are amassing/developing are all aimed at firing at Guam and keeping the U.S. from intervening?
Can you explain why the US stopped Taiwan from making a nuke?
True that.
See the three conditions by which China will attack I previously mentioned
China has an abundance of wealth so its military has a lot of money to play with to get new war toys like missiles which have to be aimed at somebody
May as well be Taiwan and US outposts
CCK said he stopped nuclear weapons development because Taiwan had only one enemy and that was China and his govt does not ever wish to unlease nukes
On the Chinese people
I don’t think Taiwan has nukes but I’m not sure
Don’t think Taiwan can just invade and knock out China but it can repel an invasion
And even when you look at how much China is spending, it pales in comparison to the US. Last year China spent $261 billion on its military. The US spent $732 billion.
The US was spending more than the Chinese currently are in the 1980s. And the Chinese must know that the trillions upon trillions of dollars the US has spent over the course of decades hasn’t been going to $10,000 toilet seat covers.
Ironic. He opens the interview by saying that you shouldn’t go off what your friends in China tell you. Then he says he changes his position on Taiwan’s defensibility based on talking to people in Taiwan.
By the way, two of my cousins in Taiwan have no faith in their ability to defend themselves.
It’s Tsai’s responsibility to raise Taiwan’s morale.
He has been in Taiwan doing Field work on this
Low morale is most likely a symptom of years of significant underinvestment in the military. Morale would improve if the military was more widely respected and it was equipped to have a chance at succeeding.
Are you sure?
Sure it is. Always has been.
The US is bound to have a few tricks up our sleeve. The question really is, can China be sure?
Sometimes I wonder if it’s because CKS and KMT cronies read 1984 and realized later on that military spending takes away from quality of life and productivity. It’s a very enlightening read. I mean CKS wanted to retake mainland China, but they obviously abandoned that hope at some point, based on how little Taiwan spends on the military.
Plus honestly arms sales is really not popular with Taiwanese at the moment. Everyone thinks it’s a gargantuan waste of money, and that it’s simply paying protection to the USA.
China spends on the military because they don’t want to be in the American hegemony so they basically have to. But even they realize that the people’s prosperity comes first (CCP’s rule on China depends on it).
A Tomahawk missile costs a million dollar EACH. Use it, it and its target represents work wasted that amounted to zero tangible benefit for society.
So you’re OK to unify with China, right?
Protection money = paying money to someone else to defend you
Arms purchases = paying money for weapons you can use to defend yourself
China spends on the military because it has thousands of years of imperialist history and the CCP is still hung up about the century of humiliation.
I’m no fan of endless and unnecessary war, but there are bad people doing bad sh*t in the world today. Standing up to them, which sometimes requires the use of force, might be expensive and ugly but if nobody does it, the outcome isn’t going to promote peace.
C’mon man, Taiwan spends like 2% of GDP on the military.
I haven’t read 1984, but it sounds like the message it’s conveying isn’t true.
A lot of improvements in standard of living came out of the military.
For example, the bureaucracy was a Chinese invention a couple of thousand years before it arose in the West. Why? Not because Chinese people are special, but because China was fighting endless wars for hundreds of years (a good book on that is Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order.). Internet, robomops, smoke detectors, tons of other inventions arose out of wartime needs. Israel’s military service has created a robust entrepreneurial culture.
Taiwan has an opportunity, with so many F-16s. It now has an F-16 repair center. It can become a regional one if geopolitical difficulties can be overcome. Taiwan can make bank be servicing F-16s from Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and Singapore.
It can develop an cybersecurity industry out of the need to stop Chinese hackers.