Showing off is one way to get attention. The East Asian financial crisis has dragged on for two years now, and in subtle ways the slump has pushed the region’s various antagonisms toward the bottom of the global agenda: who cares about a bunch of worn-out tigers? But all along, those antagonisms have continued to grow. Look no farther than Taiwan. Responding partly to a missile buildup in southern China, Washington has agreed to supply Taiwan with more military hardware and early-warning-radar technology. Taiwan itself wants to upgrade land- and sea-based air-defense systems and to develop cruise missiles and other new weapons. What’s more, a Pentagon study released last week includes Taiwan, along with Japan and South Korea, in the scope of a potential Theater Missile Defense (TMD) for the region.
TMD would change everything. China has loudly objected to Taiwan’s new prominence in regional-defense schemes, and not just because Beijing claims the island as a renegade province. Chinese strategists suspect that TMD is the latest step in a conspiracy to build a Pacific alliance against China, anchored by the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and now threatening to include Taiwan as well. In fact, there is nothing Taipei would like better. In the 1990s China’s military buildup has come to focus conspicuously on pressuring Taiwan, while Taipei has had to abandon its antiquated dream of reconquering the mainland. In Taipei’s view, TMD is not only a potential building block in its new goal of creating an impregnable Fortress Taiwan, but a way of recruiting new allies to its own defense. And when major players start shifting alliances in the Taiwan strait, the whole world should pay attention.
China’s displays of military muscle-flexing lie at the heart of Taiwan’s insecurities. During their 1996 showdown, when China staged missile-firing exercises around Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army had deployed 30 to 40 DF-9 and DF-11 missiles along the coast facing Taipei. Now there are 120 to 150 mobile launchers, says military analyst Andrew Yang of Taiwan’s Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies. Given China’s production capacity, that figure could grow to 650 missiles by the year 2005, according to Pentagon estimates. China’s military buildup is “a dangerous demonstration of military intention,” Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Jason Hu told NEWSWEEK. “It’s also a form of blackmail.”
Beijing’s words can be just as threatening. On his recent U.S. trip, China’s Prime Minister Zhu Rongji dismayed Taiwanese when he cited Abraham Lincoln as the “model” of a leader who went to war to keep his country united. Based on the U.S. Civil War’s 600,000 dead, says Taiwan’s Maj. Gen. Kung Fan-ding, “we should prepare to sacrifice the lives of 50 million” Chinese on both sides of the strait.
The United States inevitably would find itself in the middle of any serious showdown between Beijing and Taipei. Washington’s thinking about East Asian missile defenses gained urgency last summer, after North Korea test-fired a rocket over Japanese territory. Washington’s only decision so far, the Pentagon study stresses, is “to protect forward-deployed U.S. forces in the region”– the 77,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan and South Korea. All the same, the study also considers possible “missile architecture options” for Taiwan, as well as defining what U.S. technologies would work against a range of Chinese attacks.
The Pentagon’s TMD thinking is still in its preliminary stages. Successors to the U.S. Patriot missiles used against Iraqi Scuds in the gulf war might work against short-range Chinese missiles, traveling up to 300 kilometers, the planners suggest. Taiwan already fields three fixed batteries of Patriots around Taipei. But Patriot-type missiles wouldn’t have the reach to defend Taiwan against medium-range Chinese missiles like the DF-21, which has a range of more than 2,000 kilometers.
For those, Taiwan would need U.S. systems designed to intercept incoming missiles before they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The good news for Taiwan is that a single land base or ship could defend the entire island against anything Beijing could toss at it. The bad news is that the new U.S. land- and sea-based systems are not expected to reach “initial operational capability” until after 2007.
As always, Taiwan’s friends on Capitol Hill lobbied hard to include the little democratic bastion under any projected U.S. defense umbrella. Many Taiwanese politicians love the idea. “For the moment,” says a Western analyst in Taipei, “the TMD debate is not about defending Taiwan but about scoring points against Beijing.” But Taiwan’s military planners can’t afford to wait for new U.S. technology to come online. For the first time in several years, NEWSWEEK has learned, Taipei’s top national-security advisers have been meeting as often as twice a week, sometimes with President Lee Teng-hui in attendance, to mull over their defense options.
There are no easy answers. A Chinese air attack could strike across the 95-mile-wide Taiwan Strait within five minutes of launch. At present, Taiwan’s “strong net” radar system provides only a 90-second warning. Long-range radar would increase that window by three or four times, making Taiwan’s U.S.-supplied Patriots more effective. Taiwan also deploys its own Skybow I and II missiles, which are modeled after the Patriot.
Taiwan’s domestic arms industry should not be underestimated. For a small country not formally recognized by most of the world, Taiwan has been remarkably successful at developing military technologies. Its U.S. F-16 fighters and French Mirage jets and Lafayette frigates supplement Taiwan’s own Indigenous Defense Fighter and FFG7 Perry-class warships, based on U.S. technology.
The real goal of Taipei’s arms-buying program is to acquire the appropriate weaponry without igniting Beijing’s fury. The time-tested answer: technology transfers. China will predictably protest every high-profile Taiwanese purchase, such as the F-16s bought from the Bush administration. Less glamorous purchases of plans and licenses, on the other hand, attract less heat. Taiwan’s constant appetite for state-of-the-art components has kept American defense contractors humming along for decades. Yet Taiwan itself gets credit for developing the likes of a sophisticated ground-attack aircraft that more than matches anything deployed by China, according to U.S. experts.
One of Beijing’s deepest objections to TMD, says a former Pentagon official, is that the guidance systems can be adapted to ground-to-ground offensive missiles. He recalls that in the 1970s, Taiwan infiltrated a missile-design team into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “person by person–first a nose-cone-design specialist, then a rocket-fuselage specialist, then a specialist in rocket telemetry.” Eventually nearly two dozen Taiwanese technology spies were caught and thrown out of the university.
Many outsiders now are keeping an eye on the Chung Shan Institute for Science and Technology, the nerve center of Taiwan’s weapons research. Experts there aim to finish work on a cruise missile by 2004, or about the same time as China. Taiwan also worked on a medium-range, solid-fuel ballistic missile. But the program was shut down in the 1980s, says Chu Yun-han, a political scientist close to the military, when U.S. officials refused to supply key parts. Now those parts are available on the open market, says one informed source. Confirms Chu: “The top brass is now debating having a limited number of medium-range missiles to target Shanghai with a no first-use doctrine.”
Will Taiwan dare to pursue such lethal weapons? Eclipsed by China and abandoned diplomatically when the United States recognized Beijing in 1979, Taipei nurtured a secret nuclear-weapons program for years. The effort came to light only after a deputy director of nuclear research at Chung Shan–a CIA mole–defected to the United States in 1988 and spilled the secrets. Taiwan shut down its program–but even now, an international setback often triggers murmuring about keeping Taiwan’s nuclear option “open.”
The threat cannot be ignored as Taipei faces Beijing’s military buildup. For decades, the most likely scenario for a mainland invasion was a flotilla of ill-equipped wooden fishing boats. Now the chances of that are “virtually nil,” says a major general on Taipei’s National Security Council. Instead, Taipei expects a mainland missile attack, designed to create psychological trauma, then a sudden beach landing or assault by China’s new “rapid reaction” commandos via helicopters or parachutes. As a result, Taiwan’s deployment of troops on the island of Kinmen–two kilometers from the mainland–is less than one third of its original strength of about 100,000 soldiers (box). “The missiles would just pass over our heads,” says one soldier with a shrug.
Taipei’s military planners are most concerned about matching what mainland strategists call their “revolution in military affairs”–an attempt to leapfrog past the PLA’s outmoded military apparatus. Last week Taiwan’s Defense Minister Tang Fei warned that China’s electronic-warfare capabilities would surpass Taiwan’s if Beijing continues to develop spy satellites and military communications at the current pace. He cited the PLA’s effort to develop electronic viruses to attack an enemy’s military computers. Taiwan has a similar effort underway. “We have the best computer hackers in Taiwan ready to disrupt Beijing’s monetary system,” boasts one general. Problem is, China’s financial networks are still too primitive to be totally vulnerable.
Taiwan’s most forward-looking strategists are downright futuristic. Lin Chong-pin, vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, is obsessed with the prospect of “a Chinese death ray, fired by a giant blowtorchlike weapon,” frying American military satellites in a laser attack. China has focused on information warfare and unconventional weapons, he says, such as electromagnetic pulses produced by high-altitude nuclear explosions. Calling such exotic tactics “acupuncture warfare,” because they target key weak points in an enemy’s defenses, Lin predicts “this will replace nuclear weapons in the 21st century.” Can Beijing master high-tech battle? “The essence of warfare is the manipulation of ambiguity,” says Lin, quoting the famous Chinese martial strategist Sun Tzu. Whatever Beijing has up its sleeve, Taipei can only continue to try to outbuild, outbuy and outbluff its rival.
