Three French-made Mirage 2000 fighter jets taxi on a runway in front of a hangar at Hsinchu Air Force Base on August 5, 2022. China conducted its largest-ever military drills around Taiwan, despite condemnation from the United States, Japan, and the European Union.
Sam Yeh | AFP | Getty Images
The last time tensions between Beijing and Washington rose over Taiwan, the US Navy sent warships across the Taiwan Strait and China could do nothing about it.
Those days are over.
China’s military has undergone a transformation since the mid-1990s, when a crisis erupted over the Taiwanese president’s visit to the US, prompting an angry response from Beijing.
“It’s a very different situation now,” said Michele Flournoy, a former secretary of state for defense policy in the Obama administration. “It’s a much more competitive and much more lethal environment for our forces.”
Unlike his predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping now wields serious military might, including ship-wrecking missiles, a massive navy, and an increasingly capable air force. This new military power is changing the strategic calculus for the US and Taiwan, raising the potential risks of conflict or miscalculation, say former officials and experts.
During the 1995-96 crisis, echoing current tensions, China held live-fire military drills, issued stern warnings to Taipei, and fired missiles in waters near Taiwan.
But the US military responded with the largest show of force since the Vietnam War, sending a number of warships to the area, including two aircraft carrier groups. The carrier Nimitz and other battleships sailed the narrow waterway separating China and Taiwan, driving home the notion of America’s military dominance.
“Beijing should know that the United States is the strongest military power in the western Pacific,” said then-Secretary of Defense William Perry.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was then a low-tech, slow-moving force that was no match for the US military, with a lackluster Navy and Air Force not straying too far from China’s shores, the former and current US, officials said.
“They realized they were vulnerable, that Americans could sail aircraft carriers right in their face, and there was nothing they could do about it,” said Matthew Kroenig, who served as an intelligence and defense official with the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.
The Chinese, stunned by the high-tech display of the US military in the first Gulf War, “went to school the American way of war” and launched a concerted effort to invest in their military and – most importantly – their position in it to strengthen the Taiwan Straits, Kroenig said.
Beijing drew a number of lessons from the 1995-96 crisis, concluding that it needed satellite surveillance and other intelligence to spot adversaries on the horizon, as well as a “blue water” navy and air force capable of are ready to sail and fly across the western Pacific David Finkelstein, director of security affairs for China and the Indo-Pacific at CNA, an independent research institute.
“The PLA Navy has made remarkable strides since 1995 and 1996. It’s truly amazing how quickly the PLA Navy has built up. And of course, the PLA Air Force almost never flew over water in 1995-96,” said Finkelstein, a retired U.S. Army officer.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has described China’s dramatic rise as a military power as a strategic earthquake.
“We are witnessing what I believe to be one of the greatest shifts in global geostrategic power the world has ever seen,” Milley said last year.
The Chinese military is now “very impressive, especially in and around domestic waters, especially around Taiwan,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and former commander of NATO.
China’s navy now has more ships than the US, he said. Although US Navy ships are larger and more sophisticated, with more experienced crews and commanders, “quantity has a quality all its own,” said Stavridis, an analyst with NBC News.
China is currently building amphibious ships and helicopters to stage a possible full-scale invasion of Taiwan, experts say, but whether the PLA is capable of such a feat remains a matter of debate.
During the 1995-96 crisis, China lost communications with one of its missiles and came determined to wean itself from US-linked global positioning systems, said Matthew Funaiole, a China expert at the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They thought we couldn’t rely on technology from other countries,” he said.
Officials in the US and Taiwan must now consider a much deadlier and more agile Chinese military that can deny America the ability to deploy warships or aircraft with impunity and even operate safely from bases in the region, Funaiole and other experts said.
“The game has changed in terms of how strong the deck is for USA. It’s much more of a balanced game. Whatever the US does, China has options,” Funaiole said.
Outraged by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week, China has conducted large-scale live firearms military drills, including launching ballistic missiles, that have surpassed drills conducted in the 1995-96 standoff. The exercises take place in waters surrounding Taiwan to the north, east and south, with some of the exercises being within about 10 miles of Taiwan’s coast. According to experts, China once lacked the ability to conduct a major exercise in waters east of Taiwan.
Taipei officials said China fired at least 11 ballistic missiles near Taiwan on Thursday, one of which flew over the island. Japan said five rockets landed in its economic exclusion zone near an island south of Okinawa.
This time, the US government has made no announcements about warships moving through the Taiwan Strait. “Biden could try that, but China could take them to the bottom of the straits. They couldn’t do that in 1995,” Kroenig said.
The White House said Thursday the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan would remain in the region while China conducts drills around Taiwan to “monitor the situation.” However, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said a previously planned ICBM test had been postponed to avoid confusion.
Despite harsh rhetoric between the two powers and rising tensions, China is not seeking war over Pelosi’s visit and is trying to stage a show of force, not an invasion of Taiwan, former US officials and experts said.
For now, Chinese President Xi is focused on bailing out his country’s sluggish economy and securing an unprecedented third term at the next Communist Party Congress later this year. But China’s newfound military could lead to over-reliance on Beijing’s decision-making or lead to an escalation cycle in which each side feels compelled to respond to show determination, former officials said.
There is a risk that Xi may underestimate US resolve and that he believes there is an opportunity to seize or blockade Taiwan in the next few years before American investment in new weapons shifts the military balance, Flournoy said, now Chair of the Center for a New American Security Think Tank.
“I worry that China is miscalculating because the narrative in Beijing continues to be about the US decline, that the US is turning inward,” Flournoy said. “It’s very dangerous if you underestimate your potential opponent.”
To prevent such an outcome, Flournoy argues, both Taiwan and the US must increase their armed forces to deter Beijing and increase the potential cost of a possible invasion or intervention against Taiwan.
Finkelstein said he was concerned about an “action-reaction” chain of events leading to a conflict nobody wants and that the risk of miscalculations in Beijing, Taipei and Washington “is skyrocketing.”
To keep tensions under control, the US and China need to engage in intensive dialogue to lower the temperature, he said. “We have to talk to each other all the time.”