Henry Moskov
Threat of Invasion
The threat of Chinese invasion has loomed over the island nation of Taiwan for decades. For years, the Chinese military has been mobilizing troops and building military capabilities at an unprecedented rate, with the PROC’s (People’s Republic of China) naval force surpassing the United States in 2020, thus becoming the largest naval force on earth.
In 2021, then commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson predicted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would “manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years” in testimony given to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan offered an even more dire prognosis, insisting upon an invasion in 2025. Along with aggressive Chinese military expansion and US military leaders predicting conflict, the 2021 Russian invasion of Ukraine has shaken the rules-based international order and demonstrates a modern-day regime complex enabled by a lack of intervention from the international community, putting into motion a precedent that deems irredentist ideals acceptable.
The critical question for American policymakers is how likely Taiwan is to succumb to military action by the Chinese PLA (People’s Liberation Army). The answer in reality is not very likely at all. This piece will lay out the counters for fears of invasion and explore principally how the geography of Taiwan would repel any hypothetical Chinese incursion.
Ukraine and Taiwan: Apples and Oranges
While sowing deep wounds into international norms and inspiring fear worldwide, the contextual circumstances that developed into war in Ukraine are not comparable to the conditions of China and Taiwan. At face value, the two dynamics seem approximate- both instances involve a smaller state neighboring a culturally similar giant that views it as a renegade province that has merely temporarily broken away from its true hearth. Chinese President Xi Jinping claimed that those “who forget their heritage, betray their motherland and seek to split the country will come to no good,” which is not far from the use of rhetoric that Russian President Vladimir Putin has infamously been perpetrating to justify the Russo-Ukrainian war. However, there lies an underscoring distinction within these two territorial conflicts that explains why one superpower has taken action while one remains passively blowing smoke: geography.
Russia and Ukraine share a border of approximately 2,000 kilometers, or 1,200 miles. This boundary saddles flat countryside and barren wheat fields that tanks and infantry can sweep across and conquer with ease; and still, Russia has yet to conquer with ease ease. After 2 years of battle on supposedly easily subduable land, the determination of Ukrainian forces has left Russian forces stuck behind the Dnipro River and in eastern oblasts, making minimal progress.
Now, apply the same conditions for war to the island nation of Taiwan. China and Taiwan are separated by the Taiwanese Straight, where the shortest point of connection between China and the Taiwanese mainland is 130 kilometers or 80 miles of ocean. A hypothetical PLA force invasion would be met with the unfriendly coasts of Taiwan creating immediate difficulties. The eastern two-thirds of the island is dominated by ragged cliffs unsuitable for landing infantry, while the western third is a sandy plain sloping into the ocean, surrounded by shallow waters that could not sustain the thousands of warships necessary for such a naval assault. Thus, a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan is far more nuanced than the conventional warfare presently seen in Ukraine.
What Would an Invasion Look Like?
Landing Chinese troops on Taiwanese soil would take the largest amphibious assault in the history of mankind; the following arguments will underscore this fact by exploring a hypothetical invasion and further dissecting the inevitable geographical difficulties the PLA forces would face. It is generally accepted amongst military scholars that in order to successfully subdue a population, the necessary military-to-civilian ratio would have to be 20 to 1,000. It would thus take approximately 480,000 Chinese troops to invade and occupy Taiwan’s current population of 24 million. However, the number of 480,000 troops does not account for the horrific losses that would occur while crossing the wide-open straight under fire from Taiwanese rockets and other defense systems. The number of soldiers likely to be used for this invasion would be somewhere around 720,000, over one-third of currently conscribed PLA military personnel.
It would additionally require thousands of warships, transport vehicles, and aircraft to carry these men across the straight and defend them, all costing billions of dollars. The coasts of Taiwan are disadvantageous to any sort of invasion force due to the raggedness of the rocky shores and shallowness of the beaches that simply could not hold the forces required for a full-scale invasion. There lie only a few small strips of beach across the Southwest and North of the island that could be used as potential docking zones. These areas would bottleneck Chinese amphibious forces, giving Taiwan ample time to prepare to defend itself. Still, this is not the last barrier to triumph over the island nation.
If invading forces were able to pull off the miracle of pushing past the heavily armed parcels of the coastal frontline, the interior terrain of the island would be equivalently trying. The interior of Taiwan houses mountains enveloped in dense jungle, prime operating environments for Taiwanese insurgency forces to dig in and maintain a stiff resistance. Whether it be US soldiers in Vietnam or the Wehrmacht in Finland, historical wartime context informs us that native defenders prove to be virtually invisible goaders while operating out of the hermitages of nature. The monumental task of a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan is laden with geographical complexities and remains to be a borderline delusory idea unprecedented in military history.
The Role of the United States
The topography around not just Taiwan, but East Asia as a whole instructs the United States that the best course of action is to offer unwavering support to Taiwan. Across China’s shore lies a sizable chain of islands and land masses that effectively blankets the entirety of the coast. Included in these islands and peninsulas are the Ryukyu islands of Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and, of course, Taiwan; almost all are either direct allies of the United States or under its influence. China’s export-driven economy depends heavily on its coastal ports and routes of trade, and as of now, any route for Chinese merchant ships is to go through a US-controlled choke point. Should there be a larger Sino-American conflict in the future, the chain of islands could be utilized by the United States to strangle China’s economy into submission. This is why the China-Taiwan conflict has taken such prominence in contemporary Asian/Pacific affairs: the struggle to break or maintain a geographical noose.
But, the likely reality is that this island chain will not be broken by any form of hard power for the previously stated reasons, and China knows it. They have relied on strategies of probing to promote fear and destabilization by the idea of possible invasion, without a real anticipation of further military action. The PROC ‘flexes its muscles’ even more in retaliation as a result of statements or actions of open support from the United States, most notably when Chinese air force test flights infringed upon Taiwanese airspace following a visit to the island from then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Yet, to reiterate, China knows that a bonafide invasion would result in catastrophe, therefore, bursts of anger and paroxysms may be disregarded as mere tantrums from the United States perspective. Instead, the US should stand with greater solidarity with Taiwan in order to protect American interests of both security and democracy. With Taiwan as a strong ally and fears of greater military action deterred by a multitude of geographic factors, the United States can brave the future of impending Chinese competition with the comfort of enacting strong measures.
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