Chinese President Xi Jinping (second from right in the front row) put on a military uniform and took a photo with the PLA when he inspected the Central Theater of the People’s Liberation Army.Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has been condemned by the world, and Russia’s ally China has never given up on attacking Taiwan by force. Archyde.com reports that Chinese military leaders have turned to Moscow for weapons and logistics command theory for decades, and Russian and Chinese militaries have held increasingly intensive joint exercises in recent years, including a large-scale joint exercise in Russia in September 2020. military exercise. However, this strategic assumption of cooperation is being tested after the Russian battalion-level tactical group (BTG) got stuck in Ukraine. Chinese strategists are learning from the ongoing Ukrainian-Russian war, discussing the CCP’s tactical options for attacking Taiwan by force and how to deal with Western countries’ information warfare.
According to Archyde.com, two academics and four diplomats in Asia and the West with ties to Chinese strategists said Chinese strategists were discussing the Ukraine-Russia conflict privately and shared their concerns about Western involvement in Ukraine and what the outside world believed to be Russian criminals. wrong view. While their conclusions have yet to appear in any official Chinese military journals or media, Russia’s failure to quickly defeat the Ukrainian military is a key issue for them, and they also express concern about the performance of the untested Chinese military, which these Chinese strategists are concerned about Another factor is how Russia will contend with indirect military assistance from the West, as China would face the same challenges when it comes to attacking Taiwan by force.
Zhao Tong, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointed out that many Chinese strategists are monitoring the Ukrainian-Russian war to speculate on how the conflict would develop if it were between China and Western countries. There have been private discussions among Chinese strategists that Beijing needs to better deal with information warfare from Western countries. For Chinese strategists, an important part of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict is how Western countries manipulate international public opinion from their perspective and decisively change the international community’s response to the war.
Zhao Tong mentioned that CCP strategists believe that when the CCP is attacking Taiwan, it may consider launching a more powerful and comprehensive operation at the beginning, in order to shock the Taiwan military and at the same time curb the willingness of the enemy forces to intervene to gain a huge advantage. However, Collin Koh, a maritime security expert at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, stressed that if the CCP tried to deter Taiwan with overwhelming force at the initial stage, it could lead to many civilian casualties, further complicating the operation, and causing opposition from the international community. Opinions are stronger.
Some Chinese strategists believe that information warfare in Western countries has created a much worse impression of Russia’s performance than it actually is. Therefore, Chinese strategists believe that the Chinese government needs to pay more attention in this area. In addition, there will also be logistical challenges for the CCP to attack Taiwan by force. They worry that a Chinese military attack on Taiwan will face greater logistical challenges than Russia’s mobilization of troops on the border to attack Ukraine, which will require coordination and cooperation between the southern, eastern and northern theater commands.
In addition, Chinese strategists are concerned that they do not yet know how well Chinese troops will perform in a modern conflict, since Chinese troops have no combat experience since the Vietnam War in 1979. Alexander Neill, a senior fellow at the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, analyzed that Taiwan would pose a much larger logistical challenge than Ukraine, and it would be very difficult to prepare a large-scale offensive force without being detected. of. At present, there is still too much unknown to the outside world about the performance of the Chinese military under the pressure of war.