.
China
August 10, 2022 China’s state council has proposed imposing Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” policy on Taiwan and said it would not renounce the use of force to take the island. The proposals, contained within the first state council white paper on Taiwan in two decades, reveal Beijing’s long-term plans for the democratic island. China’s state council said that after unification, Taiwan would be allowed to implement a social system that was different from that of the mainland and “continue to operate under a high degree of autonomy”. The same commitment was made to Hong Kong in 1997 but the semi-autonomous region has since had dozens of pro-democracy leaders thrown in jail, newspapers shut down, and patriotic education enforced through national security laws. The state council said today that Taiwanese compatriots “who support reunification of the country and rejuvenation of the nation will be the masters of the region”. It said peaceful unification would allow Taiwan to integrate into China’s economic and social development but warned that resistance could cause it to be taken by force. “We will not renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all necessary measures,” the state council white paper said. “Use of force would be the last resort taken under compelling circumstances.” In a direct attack on the Democratic People’s Party, the paper accused Tsai’s government of being a key driver of the separatist movement and attempts “to prevent the Chinese nation’s great rejuvenation”. The government of President Tsai won a landslide re-election in 2020 on a platform of remaining separate but not officially independent of China. Tsai has reiterated Taiwan’s policy is to maintain the status quo. The number of Taiwanese in favour of unification with China has dropped sharply over the past decade as China has become more authoritarian under President Xi. A yearly poll conducted by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation shows only 11 per cent of Taiwanese favour unification, while 26.4 per cent want to maintain the status quo and 46.6 per cent want Taiwan to become officially independent. (Source: BrisbaneTimes)
Aug 8. 2022 Hong Kong will reduce the period of time people entering the city must spend in hotel quarantine to three days from seven. People arriving at Hong Kong’s international airport will be required to go to an approved quarantine hotel and, if they don’t have COVID-19, can then serve four days of health monitoring either at home or in a hotel. The reduction to the quarantine period follows the removal of flight suspensions last month. Arrivals also still face the prospect of being sent to a community isolation facility should they test positive on one of the copious number of tests they’ll be required to take. Rooms are in short supply and costs are high, while anyone who is infected in the days before their trip is forced to delay travel. Travelers will also face a busy schedule of tests. Officials also unveiled a tiered health-code system reminiscent of what’s used in mainland China. A yellow code will be given to inbound travelers, which they’ll keep until they finished health surveillance, while anyone testing positive will be given a red code. A blue code will be shown in the city’s LeaveHomeSafe app once the quarantine or health monitoring period has ended. An isolation facility with 3,000 units at the site of the city’s old airport has just been launched, with the security minister highlighting sea views from some of the rooms in a social media post. The city reported more than 4,000 infections yesterday. (Source JapanTimes)
Aug 8, 2022 New virus in China with animal to human transmission. Experts believe it could be lethal, though no death reports have come up so far. (Source: NTD)
8 August 2022 China's military says it is continuing large-scale military drills around Taiwan after its previously announced live fire exercises ended yesterday. The Chinese army's Eastern Theatre Command said that it would practice anti-submarine attacks and sea raids. The renewed activity around Taiwan comes after Chinese maritime authorities announced that drills would also take place in other locations. In the Yellow Sea - located between China and the Korean peninsula - new daily military drills were due to start from Saturday, August 6, until the middle of August, and include live-fire exercises. In addition, a month-long military operation in one area of the Bohai sea - north of the Yellow Sea - started on Saturday. (Source: BBC)
Sunday, August 7, 2022 COVID lockdown turns Chinese tourist hotspot Sanya into nightmare for stranded tourists. The tropical southern island of Hainan in the South China Sea recorded just two positive symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the whole of last year. This month the number of cases has suddenly soared, prompting a lockdown in the city of Sanya and leaving tens of thousands of tourists stuck on the island. Sanya, the island's main tourist hub, imposed a lockdown yesterday and restricted transport links to try to stem the outbreak, even as some 80,000 visitors were enjoying its beaches at peak season. Many are now stuck inside hotels until next Saturday, if not longer. Sanya reported 689 symptomatic and 282 asymptomatic cases between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7. Other cities around Hainan province, including Danzhou, Dongfang, Lingshui, and Lingao, have all reported over a dozen cases in the same period. Yesterday, the sale of rail tickets out of Sanya was suspended. More than 80% of flights to and from Sanya had been cancelled. Hainan has been closed to overseas tourists for the past two and half years since China, in response to the pandemic, stopped issuing tourist visas and implemented strict quarantine rules. Sanya's government announced yesterday that tourists who have had their flights cancelled would be able to book hotel rooms at half price. Dozens of tourists today complained that they were still having to pay rates similar to the original prices. A foreign tourist who lives in China and was on honeymoon in Sanya, said that additional issues for stranded tourists included massive price hikes in food delivery fees, meal prices at hotels, as well as flight tickets out of Hainan. Food supplies in his hotel were also running low, he said. Sanya authorities have said that stranded tourists can leave the island starting next Saturday, August 13, provided they have done five COVID tests and obtained negative results for all of them. (Source: Reuters)
Aug 6 2022 China's state controlled media boasted it has rehearsed sinking US aircraft carriers using hypersonic missiles as part of a massive war games amid simmering tensions over Taiwan. Hypersonic missiles such as the DF-17 could be used, it claimed, to hit "moving targets at sea". (Source: TheU.S.Sun)
August 6, 2022 The Chinese government has reacted with Pelosi’s visit by ending dialogue with Washington in key areas, including military-to-military talks, climate change, cross-border crime and drug trafficking, and the repatriation of illegal migrants. The eight countermeasures announced yesterday specifically cancel China-US Theatre Commanders meetings, China-US Defense Policy Coordination talks and China-US Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings. White House spokesperson Kirby announced further anti-China provocations, with US naval and air transits of the Taiwan Strait in the “next few weeks.” Taiwan is not only critical to China strategically but is home to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has a virtual monopoly on the production of the most advanced semiconductors vital for countless commercial and military applications. US imperialism is consciously exploiting Taiwan and endangering its population, in the same way as it has used Ukraine to provoke a war with Russia. It is seeking to provoke a conflict over the island and drag China into a military quagmire that will weaken and fracture the country. (Source: WSWS)
August 6, 2022 Jiang, the party leader from 1989 to 2002, had dabbled in creating a Chinese equivalent of the United States’ National Security Council, but political inertia stood in the way. His successor, Hu, increased spending on the military and domestic security, but let their chiefs turn them into fiefs where they promoted cronies and collected kickbacks, including company shares and hoards of cash and gems. One year after Mr. Xi took office, he announced before hundreds of senior officials that China would establish a National Security Commission. At the commission’s first meeting in 2014, Mr. Xi told officials that the threats demanded a “comprehensive view of national security.” Under this approach, domestic and foreign dangers were often seen through a prism of ideological rivalry with the West. Mr. Xi is the chairman of the National Security Commission. Through new rules and personnel appointments, Mr. Xi has made sure that this expanding system stays firmly in his hands. In 2019, when demonstrations filled streets in Hong Kong for months, protesters clashed with the police, Beijing warned that Hong Kong risked succumbing to a “color revolution” backed by Western governments. A senior aide of Mr. Xi, Ding, is widely believed to be head of the Commission’s administrative office, steering its operations. The chief deputy in the office is Chen, the minister of state security. The commission is one of the most secretive bodies of a secretive state. Its size, staffing and powers remain unclear. Its officials rarely meet foreigners. The full membership gathers roughly once a year, like other top bodies of Chinese leaders. Mentions of the security meetings usually emerge only on local party websites summarizing its orders for officials. The national commission established local security committees across provinces, cities and counties. These local committees focus on domestic threats like protests and dissent. Chinese universities were pressed to observe and report on “ideological” problems among teachers and students, which included keeping track of their online comments. Security officials ordered cadres to closely monitor persistent protesters, people with histories of mental illness, former prisoners and others deemed risks to safety and stability. Party leaders approved China’s first full National Security Strategy, an internal document late last year, laying out broad goals through 2025. It calls for ensuring that China can provide more of its own food and core technology and for developing ways to defuse social unrest before it erupts. China must deepen its partnership with Russia to withstand international threats, says the new, 150-page textbook on Mr. Xi’s “comprehensive outlook on national security”, whose authors include officials from the National Security Commission. To Mr. Xi, national security is a “people’s war,” enlisting not just military officers, but also elementary schoolteachers and neighborhood workers. On each National Security Education Day on April 15, children have lessons about dangers that include food poisoning and fires, spies and terrorists. It reminded the pupils of the Ministry of State Security’s phone number for reporting anything suspicious. Neighborhoods have founded “National Security People’s Line-of-Defense” groups to ferret out potential dissidents and “suspicious” foreigners. The Ministry of State Security recently offered rewards of up to $15,000 for citizens who report information on security crimes. “This evil wind of ‘color revolution’ has never ceased,” Wang, a party official in China’s office for Hong Kong affairs, wrote recently in a new Chinese journal on national security. “Like the Covid virus, it constantly mutates.” Under these pressures, China is becoming a country where - as in grim eras in its past - vigilance can easily spiral into paranoia. Internally that’s how officials think now: behind every problem, every protest, is also a plot. As Mr. Xi prepares to claim a breakthrough third term as leader at a Communist Party congress this fall, he has signaled that national security will be even more of a focus. Strains over Covid and pandemic restrictions, superpower divisions deepened by Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as rising food and energy prices, are part of a constant onslaught of challenges. In the run-up to the congress, officials have been gathering in meetings to reverently study the new textbook that explains Mr. Xi’s vision. “Unless political security is assured, the country will inevitably fall apart, scattering like a box of sand, and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will be out of the question,” the book says. “Pursuing absolute security is, first, unrealistic; second, too costly; and third, will harm the country in pursuing other values,” Jia, a professor at Peking University who is a senior member of a Chinese government consultative council, wrote in a Chinese journal this year. (Source: dnyuz)
Aug 5 2022 China is convinced it now needs to hit America "hard and early " in a surprise Pearl Harbor-style attack to invade Taiwan, Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University and a former China analyst at the Pentagon, told. Earlier this year, she suggested such an attack could see America lose a war to China in a week as it struggled to get its forces in place to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing increasingly views an invasion of the island as inseparable from a war with the US. “I met with some Chinese government officials this morning and they communicated to me that the status quo has been broken,” she said. “Now they have an opportunity to build a new status quo and that’s going to be one more beneficial for them in which they’re present and operating because this exacerbates the US problem of early warning. “There will be large scale mobilisations and exercises that are basically combat rehearsals. “If it becomes routine for China to be engaging in mass mobilisations then it’s harder for the United States to know if it’s a blockade of Taiwan or just an exercise.” Japan, South Korea and the island of Guam are just some of the locations which serve the US army, navy and air force near China and Taiwan. Guam has 6,000 servicemen on the island, South Korea hosts 26,000, while Japan has 56,000. And the main source of power for Washington in the region is the mighty Seventh Fleet. The fleet deploys between 50 to 70 warships, including aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, cruisers and assault ships. Some 27,000 sailors and marines are service with the fleet - which also has around 150 aircraft. And at the core of the fleet is the Fifth Carrier Strike Group, currently headed by USS Ronald Reagan - which is currently operating close to Taiwan. In recent book Defending Taiwan foreign policy experts Brands and Beckley warned too, the war could begin with China launching a pre-emptive strike on US forces. The experts, who penned the chapter "Getting Ready for a Long War" in the book for the American Enterprise Institute, argue the US is preparing for the "wrong kind of war" over Taiwan. Both sides are readying their militaries for a "splendid little war". But they warn Chinese and US military leaders will instead end up getting a long, grinding conflict with an overt risk of a nuclear exchange. They warn the "most worrying" scenario would see Beijing attempt to launch a "surprise missile attack" on American forces in Asia. Chinese military doctrine demands that they attempt to "paralyse the enemy in one stroke" - and they warn "by the time the [US] was ready to fight, the war might effectively be over". Brands and Beckley describe how Beijing will seek to blunt any response by the US. The massive assault would then be followed by cyberattacks and anti-satellite operations to try sow chaos and stop any effective response by Taiwan and the US. They go on: "And the PLA would race through the window of opportunity, staging amphibious and airborne assaults that would overwhelm Taiwanese resistance." "By the time the United States was ready to fight, the war might effectively be over." Military exercises have been launched just 12 miles from the island, with 100 warplanes, missiles being fired, and tanks gathering on beaches. State controlled media has been turning up the heat on the rhetoric, referring to the drills as "rehearsals for the reunification operation". (Source: TheU.S.Sun)
August 4, 2022 China says it conducted "precision missile strikes" in the Taiwan Strait today as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades. The drills are due to run from today to Sunday, August 7, and include missile strikes on targets in the seas north and south of the island in an echo of the last major Chinese military drills held in 1995 and 1996. China has given no word on numbers of troops and military assets involved. The exercises appear to be the largest held near Taiwan in geographical terms. The exercises involved troops from the navy, air force, rocket force, strategic support force and logistic support force. (Source: Nikkei)
2022-08-03 The English-language Global Times news outlet, which is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, included in a post early today that conventional missiles are expected to fly over the island of Taiwan for the first time. It is clearly designed to intimidate the people of Taiwan and underscore the threat of Chinese missiles to the island. (Source: USNews)
Aug 3 2022 China has announced a series of live-fire military exercises around Taiwan, with the Eastern Theatre Command saying that "joint naval and air exercises will be conducted in the northern, southwestern, and southeastern sea and airspaces" of the island. It is also set tomorrow to begin further live-fire military drills in zones encircling Taiwan - at some points within just 12 miles of the island's shore. Commercial ships and flights have been warned to avoid these areas during these times. The drills will include "long-range live ammunition shooting" in the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from mainland China and straddles vital shipping lanes. China could potentially keep up this level of aerial war games for days if not weeks, stretching Taiwan's smaller airforce as it seeks to drive away planes. If China disrupts shipping in the Taiwan Strait, a key global trade route, this could harm its own economy. Rumours are flying of a possible missile test close to Taiwan as an act of provocation. (Source: TheU.S.Sun)
Tuesday, August 2, 2022 Beijing announced six exclusion zones encircling Taiwan to facilitate live-fire military drills from today to Sunday, with some of the areas crossing into the island’s territorial waters. The size and scope of the areas could set the stage for the Chinese military’s most provocative actions near Taiwan in decades. The Taiwan Strait is the primary route for ships passing from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to points west. Almost half of the global container fleet and 88% of the world’s largest ships by tonnage passed through the waterway this year. (Source: msn)
Taiwan
August 09, 2022 Taiwan's military commenced a live-fire artillery drill simulating defence against an attack. (Source: TheWeek)
6 August 2022 A top Taiwan defence ministry official leading a missile production unit was found dead today morning in a hotel room, reported government-controlled Central News Agency (CNA). Ou, who was the deputy head of the Taiwan defence ministry’s research and development unit, died from a heart attack. (Source: TheIndependent)
Thu, August 4, 2022 Dire shortage of pilots. The PLA fired 11 missiles into waters near the island today, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said, as part of China’s most provocative exercises in decades. Japan said late today it estimated at least some of those missiles flew over Taiwan - which would be the first time that had occurred - and landed in waters in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. PLA aircraft made some 960 forays into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone last year, compared with about 380 in 2020. The busy schedule prevents experienced pilots from helping to train new ones. Taiwan requires 250 hours of flight training before a pilot can fly a fighter jet like the F-16. Taipei is protected by a relatively large and modern fleet of fighter jets. But the democratically governed island could need as many as 50 years at the current rate to train enough pilots to fill the cockpits of the jets they expect to get by the middle of this decade. American military commanders estimate Chinese President Xi may have the capability to take action across the Taiwan Strait in as soon as five years, and the daily incursions are wearing down Taiwan’s pilots and the jets they fly. Taiwan will need to add at least 100 more pilots by 2026 to operate the 66 more advanced Lockheed Martin Corp. F-16Vs that President Tsai agreed to buy two years ago. The Air Force only netted 21 new F-16 pilots from 2011 to 2019. About 80% of university students in Taiwan have myopia, due to long classroom hours and high-levels of screen time on electronic devices. The Seventh Flight Training Wing on the Chihhang Air Base in eastern Taitung city, located on the Pacific coast, will house the new F-16Vs, as well as 33 locally developed “Brave Eagle” advanced jet trainers by 2024. More than half of the 70-80 trainees annually at the center are now being sent to the F-16 wing. (Source: Yahoo)
August 2, 2022 The plane took a circuitous route that studiously avoided the South China Sea - which Beijing claims - before heading up the east coast of the Philippines. So many people were tracking the US military plane ferrying her on FlightRadar that the website said some users experienced outages. The 82-year-old lawmaker, who flew on a US military aircraft, being greeted at Taipei’s Songshan Airport by foreign minister Wu. Moscow said it was “absolutely in solidarity with China”, calling the prospect of a Pelosi visit “pure provocation”. (Source: InsiderPaper)
August 2, 2022 12:46 IST Chinese planes were flying close to the median line of the sensitive waterway today morning. Since yesterday several Chinese warships had remained close to the unofficial line dividing the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan's defence ministry had "reinforced" its combat alertness level from today morning to today noon. The Taiwan dollar slipped to its lowest levels in more than two years on the weaker side of 30 per US dollar and investor worries about a potential Pelosi visit and China's reaction appeared to be behind today's declines in China's yuan and north Asian stock markets. Taiwan newspaper Liberty Times said Pelosi's delegation was due to arrive at 10:20 pm (1420 GMT) today. (Source: IndiaToday)
08/02/2022 Two Chinese warships - a missile destroyer and a frigate - were spotted in international waters off the coast of Lanyu Island in eastern Taiwan early today morning, 45 nautical miles southeast of Lanyu at around 4 a.m.. Over the past two days, PLA reconnaissance vessels, as well as missile destroyers and frigates, have been plying waters southeast of Taiwan's Hualien County and Lanyu. The Chinese vessels seen off Lanyu early today were likely a Type 055 stealth guided missile destroyer and a Type 054A guided-missile frigate. The Type 055 frigate has both aerial and maritime surveillance capabilities, and its radar has a high-altitude operating range of 560 kilometers. There has been quite a lot of activity east of Taitung County in the Pacific Ocean these past few days. An unusual number of Taiwan Air Force Mirage 2000 fighter jets stationed at Zhi-Hang Air Base in Taitung. (Source: FocusTaiwan)
.
