China has been sending fighter aircraft and bombers into Taiwan’s airspace this month while the ruling Communist Party is issuing threats.
“The U.S. and Taiwan must not misjudge the situation, or believe the exercise is a bluff. Should they continue to make provocations, a war will inevitably break out,” the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper said in a Sept. 18 editorial.
“They are rehearsals on taking over Taiwan.”
Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute wrote on Tuesday that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, also has “ominously” written that China is “morally justified” to war against Taiwan.
Chang cited China military analyst Richard Fisher writing in the Taipei Times that Hu “is not just urging China to commence a war to murder millions of Taiwanese, he wants China to be able to kill millions of Americans as well.”
Fisher, a senior fellow of the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, told Gatestone that Beijing “may not just yet have the overall ability to invade Taiwan,” but it is running military exercises to “terrorize” Taiwan and “frighten” America.
Beijing calls the island of Taiwan “sacred” Chinese territory, but Taiwan has never been part of communist China.
Chang noted China ordered flights near Taiwan while U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar visited Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, recently, and the “incursions” have only gotten worse.
He said that on one recent day, when Beijing sent 18 airplanes, “a Chinese fighter pilot got on the radio to deny that there was a median line, which for years both sides had respected to avoid accidental contact. The pilot, breaking practice, also made a political statement, calling Taiwan a ‘pawn’ of ‘foreign forces.'”
Chang said Chinese leaders now are “risking an incident” that could “justify taking lives.”
In May, he pointed out, the People’s Liberation Army, in a surprise attack, seized Indian territory in Ladakh in the Himalayas.
“Since late August, India has recovered lost ground and, in the process, humiliated the Chinese, who have proved incapable of counterattacking,” Chang wrote. “The prospect of further advances against fierce Indian troops is not high. Especially after India, Xi Jinping looks exposed politically. Since becoming the Communist Party’s general secretary in late 2012, he has accumulated almost unprecedented power, so he now has complete accountability. There is, inconveniently for him, no one else to blame for debacles. Furthermore, he has changed China’s political system by raising the costs of failure.
“Xi, therefore, knows that should he fail, he could lose everything — power, freedom, assets, life.”
