China’s propaganda spokesman claims that China will start the war if US troops return to Taiwan

Chinese President Xi Jinping told the UN this week that he had no intention of waging a “hot war.” Days later, its main propagandist warned that “war will come” on Taiwan.

The editor-in-chief of the Global Times news service, controlled by the Communist Party of China, was outraged by suggestions that the United States might send troops to support the island’s independence for democracy.

“Once they take the step of returning US forces to Taiwan, the PLA will definitely wage a just war to safeguard China’s territorial integrity,” Hu Xinjin said.

He was responding to an essay published by a captain of the US Marine Corps in Military Review. In Deterring the Dragon, Captain Walker Mills warned that the huge military imbalance between China and Taiwan made a surprise invasion “more likely.”

Placing US troops on the island as a tripwire could deter such a hostile act, he argued.

Hu affirmed the Communist Party line that Taiwan was simply a rogue province, although the island never surrendered to Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1949 revolution.

“China’s Anti-Secession Law is a tiger with teeth,” Hu tweeted.

“No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others or reserve the advantages of development,” President Xi told the UN this week, calling for “an international order backed by international law.”

But Beijing has a very national interpretation of international law, as the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Japan and Indonesia can attest.

Fight the words

“Both the United States and Taiwan must be prepared for a very intense confrontation,” Hu threatened in the video approved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

That is precisely the point of the essay in the United States Military Review.

Captain Mills said the balance of power in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia was shifting away from the United States. This, he argues, means that US forces will have to be pre-positioned in the area “if it is committed to defending Taiwanese sovereignty.”

He warned that a swift and successful invasion of Taiwan by China would result in a long and costly military campaign “with an outcome far from certain.”

But the relatively low-level mention of “trip-wire,” or pre-positioned forces, has outraged Beijing.

“I have to say that defending such a thing is insane because it will surely trigger a war in the Taiwan Strait,” Hu said in a Global Times companion video released Tuesday.

“China’s anti-secession law stipulates three conditions for solving the Taiwan issue with military means. US forces returning to Taiwan would meet these conditions, and the People’s Liberation Army would definitely take action and wage a just war to liberate Taiwan.”

The elected government of Taiwan, however, has a different point of view.

He does not consider being placed under Beijing’s rule a “liberation.” And how can you succeed with a government you never capitulated to?

Taipei has reacted with growing alarm to the harsh crackdown on dissidents, the independent judiciary and Hong Kong’s representative parliament. She argues that Beijing’s oppressive behavior in the former British colony belies its proclaimed “One China, Two Systems” policy.

‘War will come’

“If the United States and Taiwan do not take the continent’s red line seriously, war will come,” Hu threatened, reiterating Beijing’s demands.

President Xi has repeatedly warned that any overt move toward formal independence for Taiwan will be met with force. Its Beijing-based government has gone to great lengths to exclude Taipei from all international forums, including fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now Beijing is angered by the presence of US officials on the island.

Washington, for its part, argues that these diplomatic visits have been carried out for decades.

“If the United States sends high-level officials to visit Taiwan, the mainland will no doubt react with more than just flying PLA fighter jets over the so-called ‘middle line’ of the Taiwan Strait, like PLA fighter jets flying over Taiwan to declare sovereignty, “says a defiant Hu.

Chinese warplanes began forays into Taiwan’s airspace late last week when a high-level American envoy arrived in Taipei for the funeral of a former pro-democracy president. Subsequent violations were observed on an additional two days as large-scale Chinese military exercises around the island continued.

Taipei condemned these movements as “harassment and threats”.

The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 obliges the United States to defend Taiwan against invasion.

The treaty followed the First Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954, where China seized several islands in the narrow waterway between the two countries.

The president at the time, Harry Truman, had sent the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet to the area to deter a continental attack on the then-Nationalist Party’s main island.

Hu made indirect reference to this confrontation in his threatening video: “The People’s Liberation Army is powerful now. Even if we were a little weaker than we are now, if the United States and Taiwan insist on playing their cards this way, this it is a war that we must “fight to the end, at any cost. This determination is real. “