Despite mainland bluster, Taiwanese skeptical of imminent military move by China

SEOUL, South Korea – Most Taiwanese people do not expect a Chinese invasion in the near future, even as the democratic island’s military is being increasingly menaced by Chinese forces.

A new poll released Wednesday by island democracy’s leading defense think tank found few Taiwanese people anticipate a Chinese invasion through 2029, the Reuters news agency reported.

Last year, CIA Director William Burns said that Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, to have the ability to take Taiwan by force by 2027. China considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory and has sharply criticized what it sees as a movement toward independence by the current government in Taipei.

Despite an increasing tempo of military drills and incursions by China’s military in recent months, however, a survey of 1,200 Taiwanese residents conducted by the Institute for National Defense and Security Research showed 61% of people think it was “unlikely or very unlikely” that China would attack. That finding came even as the poll also found that China’s “territorial ambitions” represent “a serious threat” to the island.

The poll also found that more than 67% of respondents said they would fight if China attacked, but respondents were split almost evenly on whether Taiwan’s massively outnumbered and outgunned armed forces were capable of defending their island.

And just 52% of those polled thought that the U.S. military would intervene in the event of a Chinese attack.

The poll was released a day before President Lai Ching-te is set to deliver the annual National Day speech, an address that analysts say will be closely scrutinized on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The blase attitude in the poll might irk the Taiwanese military, which finds itself increasingly stretched by Chinese military activities in the sea and airspace around the island. In an Oct. 3 interview with the Economist magazine, Taiwanese naval commander Admiral Tang Hua compared Chinese tactics toward Taiwan as comparable to an anaconda gradually constricting its prey to death.

“They give you extreme pressure, pressure, pressure,” he said. “They’re trying to exhaust you.”

China’s military “is trying to force Taiwan to make mistakes,” the admiral seeking, looking for “excuses” to trigger a blockade of the island by China’s rapidly expanding navy, the world’s largest.

One regional security expert said two animal-based metaphors are commonly used to discuss the China-Taiwan standoff.

“One is the ‘anaconda’ crushing Taiwan’s ribcage and squeezing out its air, and the other one is Taiwan taking a ‘prickly porcupine’ approach to its defense,” said Alex Neill, a PLA watcher at Pacific Forum. “Maybe that reflects Taiwanese confidence in their own deterrence.”

Mr. Neill said that Taiwanese residents have become “think-skinned” about the decades-long, cross-Strait threat, but said their attitude may also be reinforced by gaps in the PLA’s impressive force, which has not engaged in a shooting war in decades. Indeed, the CIA’s Mr. Burns said last year that CIA analysts believe that Mr. Xi and his military advisers harbor doubts“about whether they could accomplish that invasion.”

China’s military has suffered setbacks of its own in recent days. According to U.S. military leaks and open-source intelligence, one of China’s newest nuclear attack submarines sank at its dock in Wuhan earlier this year, a sinking the Beijing government tried to cover up.

In April, the PLA Strategic Support Force, created in 2015 to merge cyber and space assets for combined operations by the military’s various branches, was disbanded and split into three separate commands.

Late last year, the PLA top ranks were shaken up and purged. A defense minister disappeared, the Strategic Support Force’s commander was sacked and corruption scandals rocked the Strategic Rocket Force.

“My gut feeling is that Taiwanese know the PLA and how it operates as part of the Communist Party, with systemic corruption and modernization problems,” Mr. Neill said. “Taiwanese also read international news, and seeing Israel repelling missile barrages, observe that having U.S. air and theater missile defense technologies is a huge asset.”