Less then a week after The China Post highlighted in this column the potentially rapidly narrowing of gap between the U.S. and mainland China in space technology, the Financial Times reported on the quantum leap that the Asian giant has achieved in its military satellite surveillance capability.
“Starting from almost no live surveillance capability 10 years ago, today the PLA (People’s Liberation Army of China) has likely equaled the U.S.’ ability to observe targets from space for some real-time operations,” the Financial Times quoted a report published by the Washington think tank World Security Institute in the Journal of Strategic Studies.
Crowded out by stories on the crisis in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the war of words between political parties in the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election and the mysterious poisoning deaths in central Taiwan, the Financial Times’ report did not generate much response in Taiwan despite its huge significance to the nation.
As Time magazine pointed out, “China can now peer down from space at stationary targets in and around Taiwan for a significant chunk of the day — some five hours of daily live surveillance.” In addition to keeping focus on the island itself, the newly empowered Chinese “eye in the sky” — which has doubled its capacity in just 18 months, according to the think tank — will more importantly become a deterrent to the U.S. Navy from intervening in the event of a buildup in tension around the Taiwan Strait.
The ability of two U.S. aircraft carriers to enter waters near Taiwan freely and undetected during the 1996 missile crisis was a humiliating blow to the mainland military. Now the PLA has reason to believe that the same situation will not happen again. With its new surveillance capacity, the mainland has acquired part of its “Assassin’s Mace” — the strategy not to defeat the U.S. but to neutralize its military might highlighted by U.S. military analyst Andrew Krepinevich.
There is little doubt that the mainland will regard military action as pretty much the last resort and the least preferable strategy in cross-strait relations. However, assessment denial capability in the Taiwan Strait or even the entire South China Sea region will give the mainland bargaining power in cross-strait talks and South China Sea sovereignty negotiations.
The cruel fact is that Taiwan can do nothing but be prepared for an increasingly capable mainland military. However, with well-planned preparations Taiwan can still make military conflict prohibitively unsavory for the mainland, thereby adding incentives and bargaining chips for peaceful talks. The idea of the “Assassin’s Mace” — a decisive weapon that enables a person to overcome a stronger opponent — is, after all, derived from Chinese culture and is therefore not exclusive to Beijing. Taiwan should move fast in developing its next generation of deterrence strategy on top of its aging fleet of F-16s.
An obvious start would be its cyberdefense capability. U.S. military analysts regard cyberwarfare as part of China’s assessment denial strategy, meaning the mainland will invest heavily to develop abilities to blind U.S. satellites and jam its electronic devices to slow any military advance or to disable it entirely. With one of the highest Internet literacy rates and strongest IT talent bases in the world, Taiwan could significantly build up its cyberdefense ability to neutralize the neutralizing “Assassin’s Mace.”
The Chinese (culture, not the nation-state) philosophy of war, as exemplified by Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” has always valued most highly the avoidance of conflict by creating a condition of strength (military, political or economic) in which victory is a foregone conclusion.
With its eyes trained on becoming a global economic superpower, Beijing has all the reasons in the world to avoid military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, but that does not mean it will give up its military options. On the contrary, it is only reasonable that Beijing will try to enhance the strength of its military condition to the point that military victory is all but guaranteed so it can enforce its will on all partners at the negotiation table.
What Taiwan should do is not provoke war or engage in an arms race it cannot win, but be nimble in its national defense development. The goal is to maintain the condition of balanced power in which peaceful negotiation is still the best and most reasonable of means to tackle the cross-strait political issue.
