USA vs. China Ways (9.0)

Will Taiwan Become the Next Afghanistan?

The ongoing Afghanistan blunder made by the Biden administration may have many reverberations across the world in days, months and years to come. The so call Taiwan Issue will be on the top of the list.

It’s amazing to see President Biden in recent press conferences has kept swaying the topic away from the target. He just wanted to talk about the right or wrong on the decision he made on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, while the world and U.S. public focus is really on how his administration failed to have a sound and comprehensive exit plan in place, and consequently failed to handle the pullout process right. Instead, the so called withdrawal is becoming chaos and even catastrophe as we speak.

On the other hand, the Taiwan Issue refers to the long standing rival between mainland China and Taiwan — an island off the China east sea coast. Historically when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized the power in the mainland in 1949, the then incumbent Kuomintang government fled to Taiwan.

Since then both sides have claimed their government represents the sovereignty of China. The mainland’s position is they hope for a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, meanwhile won’t give up achieving the reunification by force.

From the military power standpoint, at the beginning, while the mainland was big and strong in its army forces, its air force and navy which were critical for such amphibious warfare were weak. Taiwan is small in size both as an island and armed forces, however, it has had the military backup from the U.S. and also kept enhancing its own weapon systems.

More importantly, during the 1980s, Taiwan successfully transformed itself from a totalitarian society to democracy. The democratic Taiwan has added a lot of “soft power “to its development and defense.

Mainland China, on the other hand, has been struggling in its political system modernization to date, but its fast economic development in the latest 40 years has boosted its military power especially in navy and air force. Right now the mainland clearly has an upper hand in military forces vs. Taiwan.

So here is the stern situation currently across the Taiwan strait: politically Taiwan and Mainland…