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The tank traps on the beaches of Kinmen Island are a stark reminder that Taiwan lives under constant threat from a Chinese invasion, and fears of conflict are now at their highest in decades.
Democratic Taiwan has learned to live with warnings from Beijing’s authoritarian leaders that they are ready and willing to seize a place that it considers part of its territory.
But that background static has reached levels that are hard to ignore recently with Chinese planes now crossing into Taiwan’s defense zone at an unprecedented rate and the People’s Liberation Army launching propaganda simulating an invasion of the island, and even a attack on US bases in Guam. .
Since the mid-1990s, when China launched missiles into the Taiwan Strait during a time of great stress, the saber rattling hadn’t been as loud.
Sitting under a pavilion at National Quemoy University in Kinmen, a Taiwanese-ruled island near the Chinese mainland, freshman Wang Jui-sheng says he’s feeling more than a little restless.
“China is angry with Taiwan and is acting even more brutal,” he told AFP.
“I am concerned about the possibility of military conflicts between the two sides, possibly even in the near future.”
Kinmen (population 140,000) is located just two miles (3.2 km) from the mainland and was left in the hands of nationalist forces at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 that shaped today’s China and Taiwan.
If Beijing’s troops ever cross the Taiwan Strait, they will almost certainly have to take Kinmen first.
And if war breaks out, it could easily chain the United States in chains, pitting two nuclear-armed armies against each other.
Ian Easton, author of a book on what war could look like, says the world is ignoring the rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait at its own risk.
“This is the most dangerous, unstable and transcendent flash point on the planet,” the senior director of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank that specializes in China-Taiwan affairs, told AFP.
Historically, Beijing has used carrots and sticks to pursue what it sees as the unification of China, fusing honeyed promises of shared prosperity with warnings of annihilation for Taiwan’s 23 million people.
But in recent years the carrot has almost disappeared.
Four years ago, Taiwan voted for President Tsai Ing-wen, who views the island as a sovereign state and not as part of “one China.”
China cut off official communication and accumulated economic, military and diplomatic pressure, with the aim of prompting voters to put a more Beijing-friendly politician in office next time.
It didn’t work. Tsai won a landslide second term in January, and polls show that a growing number of voters now see themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese.
The failure to win the heart of Taiwan, exacerbated by Beijing’s crackdowns on Hong Kong and Xinjiang, may explain why President Xi Jinping has taken the most belligerent stance toward Taiwan since the Mao Zedong era.
Xi, who lifted presidential term limits two years ago, has made no secret of his goals.
He has described the Taiwan takeover as an “unavoidable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people,” a project that he aims to complete by 2049, the centenary of the founding of communist China.
During a trip earlier this month to a PLA base, he told troops to “prepare for war.”
Captain James Fanell, former director of naval intelligence for the US Pacific Fleet, believes that China will move on Taiwan in some form in the next 10 years.
“The reality is that China has always had a plan and they are on a schedule,” he told AFP from the Geneva Security Policy Center, which he joined after his retirement in 2015.
“We are in the decade of concern right now.”
During his career, Fanell watched China transform from a brown-water force confined to its coast into a globally capable navy equipped with better hypersonic missiles and far more ships than the United States.
“For every boat we produce, they produce five times more,” Fanell said.
He added that what makes Beijing’s plans for Taiwan so dangerous now, compared to earlier moments of tension, is that China may now have enough military power to take the island, although any invasion would be enormously costly.
It is not yet clear whether the United States will come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of an attack. Unlike Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, Taiwan is not a treaty ally.
But Washington is forced by Congress to sell Taiwan’s weapons to defend itself, and says it opposes any forceful change in the island’s status.
The policy, dubbed “strategic ambiguity,” was designed to prevent an invasion without directly confronting China.
But there is growing bipartisan discussion in the United States about whether a shift toward strategic clarity is now needed given China’s more assertive approach.
“If Taiwan were conquered and occupied by the People’s Republic of China (China), the US alliance system in Asia would be devastated,” Easton said.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has certainly embraced Taiwan, as it clashed with Beijing on a number of issues.
Trump has been far more willing than his recent predecessors to sell major weapons systems to powerful Taiwanese forces.
In the past three years, the United States has agreed to deals worth at least $ 15 billion, including next-generation F16 fighter jets and mobile missile platforms.
It’s unclear whether Trump’s challenger Joe Biden will take a similar stance on Taiwan if he wins next week’s election.
As the great powers jostle, those living in Kinmen desperately hope that such weapons will never be needed.
“I don’t want a war to break out as both sides would suffer,” said Tsai Yan-mei, a Chinese national who married a Taiwanese and lives in Kinmen.
“I hope to live a stable life,” he added. “I enjoy democracy and freedom in Taiwan.”
aw-jta / je / th
