China sent dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan, said the island’s defense ministry on Saturday.
The Chinese military planes entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone days before Taiwan is set to conduct anti-invasion military exercises.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent a forceful flight of 37 aircrafts and seven navy vessels between Friday and Saturday, the Taiwanese defense ministry said in a statement.
Among these were J-10 and J-16 fighter jets as well as H-6 bombers.
The Taiwan defense ministry detected that 22 of these warplanes had entered the island’s air defense identification zone and had crossed the midline of the Taiwan Strait which is an unofficial boundary between China and Taiwan.
Taiwan is due to hold the annual Han Kaung exercise next week, during which the country will conduct military exercises aimed at defending itself against a possible invasion. A deepening divide
Deep divisions between China and Taiwan date back to the civil war in 1949 which ended with the ruling Communist Party taking control of the mainland.
Beijing regards Taiwan as part of mainland territory.
In recent years, China has shown its displeasure at several political activities in Taiwan by sending military planes towards the island.
Beijing stepped up its efforts to isolate Taiwan after former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022.
In April, in response to a meeting between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the PLA held large-scale military drills around the island’s sea and air.
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This is typical behavior for China to show its displeasure when Taiwan gets involved in non-China, independence-affirming things. Its so routine, that at this point it’d be more significant if they DIDNT provide some type of military response.
As a second thought it’s also probably a convenient excuse to get a little bit of military rehearsal in…
Nothing spices up the climate crisis like a little bit of possible world war and nuclear threats.
Spicy planet we have here lately.
Sigh.
How helpful, giving the anti-invasion drills some live targets to practice tracking.
Things ads going well.
If the US Government were to build on Taiwan, would any Chinese invasion/attack constitute an attack on the US? If so, I’d think that’s a war that nobody wants. If so, if so, then the US should definitely build lots of little closet sized buildings around the country to prevent it
Taiwan is not Ukraine.
Ukraine was going to be fed to the wolves (with minimal logistics and intel support with the hopes of making it a costly occupation for russia) until they held out for the first few days. Yes, there are a lot of natural resources in Ukraine that NATO wants access to, but staying on “okay” terms with russia would have had more or less the same result. We watched this play out multiple times over the past decade or two.
Taiwan is part of the central nervous system as far as the world’s technology is concerned. There are efforts to rely less on TSMC and the like, but if those factories are destroyed/damaged, pretty much the entire planet will feel the economic impact overnight. And even if china does strategic strikes to avoid damaging anything, the Taiwanese people are likely to blow them up in a “last one out gets the light” scenario.
It is an incredibly precarious situation and is why so many countries (the US in particular) will actively not acknowledge Taiwan is a country… but will still support them and make distinctions from china. And it is why The West was so fast to impose pretty severe economic sanctions on russia. Because that tells china “even if we don’t fight you, we will use this as justification to undo all of your economic manipulations for the past few decades”. Which means this would also hurt china massively.
It will really depend on who is POTUS at the time. But if china ACTUALLY attacks Taiwan, I expect a lot more support than Ukraine got. Because it is just too important to the global economy.
Because it is just too important to the global economy.
Compare the importance of China vs Taiwan, China wins by a large margin.
The only thing Taiwan has is a momentary (in the grand scheme of things) importance in chip making. This is a strategic risk so the US wants to make their own domestic production.
Quick research on Taiwan and chip production reveals that Taiwan produces ~60% of the world’s semiconductors, and over 90% of the most advanced ones. Considering the size of the country that is insane.
TSMC took a bet on chip manufacturing only (no design) and it worked. But it will be temporary, it won’t last.
Given focused effort? Other nations could “catch up” in a couple years, at the fastest. People very much underestimate just how hard it is to build fabs that can operate at the scale (both volume and tiny ass processes) Taiwan does as well as just how many disciplines need to be at the top of their game. This isn’t a case where you need to have one or two experts and the rest follow. This is a case where you need experts in a ridiculous number of disciplines.
Focused effort over time is not something governments do well. It just takes a couple politicians to question “why are we wasting money on this?” or to not play ball when the corporate entities try to play them and they are set back… possibly forever.
And that all assumes Taiwan is not making improvements.
A common metaphor is “rebuilding a plane in flight”. That is what we are doing when we are trying to catch our fabs up to Taiwan. Except they are ALSO rebuilding their planes at the same time and are a lot smarter and more experienced at doing so.
Which is the other reason why the “strategic efforts” are more or less bound to fail. Because “We need to build up infrastructure so that we only get set back a decade as opposed to a hundred years” is REALLY hard to sell. Whereas “We want to be the new big dogs” is what gets funding and bills passed… and becomes the kind of failure that youtubers vlog about for decades.
Don’t expect anything to change for at least a decade.
It’s not like the US industry has no experience with this, there is a long history doing it and expertise. Where do you think TSMC got the ball from? I don’t know exactly how many cycles ago Intel stopped. It’s just cheaper and maybe slightly better to get TSMC at the moment. So it’s not like the US is starting from scratch.
And this will be private, govt will seed it a bit. Companies see their own risk and want to mitigate it.
TSMC last I heard is setting up a plant in the us.
When I say momentary I’m talking 5-10 years, that’s why I said in the grand scheme of things. Long time horizon if you prefer. Taiwan will not have an unceasing advantage for decades to come.
Who cares? The industry was killed. Everyone involved in it in the US moved on to other projects. Even if you could round them all up and they remembered perfectly they are all a decade behind the ball.
I’m not sure about that. The trend in the industry overall has been towards separate designers and specialized fab operators, in part because the capital costs and expertise for running a modern semiconductor foundry are incredibly high. ARM, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM anre all fabless. Samsung makes their own chips, but they’re essentially ARM reference designs. Apple’s expanded their own in house design team, but even with their enormous piles of money don’t want to take on the risk of running their own fabs.
Then look at Intel’s constant stumbling towards newer process nodes vs the guys who do contact work. AMD and IBM spun off their chip manufacturing into GlobalFoundries, and AMD now uses TSMC for their CPU cores and chiplet packaging. Even Intel is talking about using TSMC for producing some of their chips.
(I know technically Intel now counts as a contract foundry, but all of the major names that were part of the IFS announcement have backed away. I’m skeptical)
I mean it won’t continue to be concentrated in Taiwan. Fab will open in the US, especially since it’s now a strategic issue.
Yeah good luck with that. No way in hell the US gets this industry back. Corporate culture here can’t adapt to a change that big.
Wait you want us to hire kids out of school, spend 5 years training them, buy specialized equipment and software, do projects that take 8 years to finish, and are so complicated that some Wall Street bro can’t even come close to understanding it. Yeah does that sound like Boeing or Google to you? It isn’t hopeless here but the corporate culture is such that this sector is doomed.
This is a good synopsis of the complexity of the problem with a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
To add to that, the US stance since 1972 has been to abide by the One China policy. As such, the US recognizes that Taiwan is legitimately owned by China. I am doubtful that this will change with this POTUS or the next. However there is also the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) which allows the US to treat Taiwan in some capacity as in independent state. The TRA does include the sale of arms for which Taiwan may use to defend itself from aggressors, and the US does sell heavily to Taiwan. The TRA also neither includes nor precludes US military intervention in the event of conflict.
What’s interesting is that in 2022 Biden said that Taiwan can define itself however the fk it wants to - not his exact words. This is a big departure from our One China policy which states no, absolutely no independence whatsoever of Taiwan. So I think things are evolving a bit, but agree with /u/Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever that there’s a lot more at stake to the US than with Ukraine.
Love the name btw.
No it wouldn’t be an attack on the US.
If China invaded Taiwan, one of the major impacts would be that Apple would cease to exist. The impacts probably cannot be overstated as it would be a 3 trillion dollar economic hit to the United States economy, along with crippling companies like Samsung. TSMC is one of the top five most critical technology companies in existence right now.
It would be like if Canada were to take out Intel.
While China holds a legally indefensible position that the straight is it’s territorial waters, so is Taiwan’s ADIZ or any claim that Chinese (or Taiwanese if they wished) planes cannot cross the midway point.
The straight is 97 nmi wide, territorial waters cannot extend beyond 12, so there’s plenty of international waters (and thus airspace) for anybody to fly on.
