China taiwan conflict

Taiwan navy personnel look on during a drill in January. China has escalated its military exercises near the island, raising tensions and prompting fears of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA Taiwan navy personnel look on during a drill in January. China has escalated its military exercises near the island, raising tensions and prompting fears of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA Read more China’s military announced joint air and sea drills near Taiwan and test launches of conventional missiles in the sea east of Taiwan. According to Chinese state media, three of the six live-fire drills will overlap with sea Taiwan claims is its territory. Ahead of the exercises, which are due to begin on Thursday, Taiwan said 27 Chinese warplanes had entered its air defence zone. Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China and says it is already a sovereign nation with no need to declare independence. It wishes to maintain the safety of the status quo and does not want a conflict, but has said it will defend itself. Taiwan’s defence ministry called China’s planned exercises an aerial and maritime blockade of Taiwan. “This is a big deal given a blockade is a legal act of war,” said Indo-Pacific defence policy expert Blake Herzinger. “I think it needs to be signalled to Taiwan that this is not the time to inflame things further.” This week, Taiwan has also been hit by a series of cyber-attacks though it is not yet cl...

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The war began in the early morning hours with a massive bombardment — China’s version of “shock and awe.” Chinese planes and rockets swiftly destroyed most of Taiwan’s navy and air force as the People’s Liberation army and navy mounted a massive amphibious assault across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait. Having taken seriously President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend the island, Beijing also struck pre-emptively at U.S. and allied air bases and ships in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. managed to even the odds for a time by deploying more sophisticated submarines as well as B-21 and B-2 stealth bombers to get inside China’s air defense zones, but Washington ran out of key munitions in a matter of days and saw its network access severed. The United States and its main ally, Japan, lost thousands of servicemembers, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft. Taiwan’s economy was devastated. And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s. The Chinese “just ran rings around us,” said former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten in And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear. “The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gam...

In recent months, China has ramped up its threats towards Taiwan, with incursions by military jets into the island’s air space and missiles fired into the sea around it. Beijing regards the territory as part of its territory and has vowed to bring it back under China’s control. President Joe Biden has made clear that any attempt to do so by force would be met with U.S. retaliation. In this video, POLITICO’s China experts explore the origins of the dispute and the current drivers behind it. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, produces 92 percent of the world’s high-end semiconductors making Taiwan an important economic prize. • Latest news, analysis and comment from POLITICO’s editors and guest writers in Europe. • Latest news, analysis and comment on German politics and beyond. • Latest news, analysis and comment on French politics and beyond. • Latest news, analysis and comment on elections in Europe and beyond. • The latest news, data and analysis on the world’s pandemic response. • Latest news, analysis and comment on migration in Europe and beyond. • Latest news, analysis and comment on defense in Europe and beyond. • Latest news, analysis and comment from POLITICO’s editors and guest writers on the continent. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

China Here's what you need to know about where things stand, and how we got here: Why is there tension between Taiwan and China? Taiwan is an island about 100 miles off the east coast of mainland China. It's only a little larger than Maryland, but while that U.S. state is home to about 6 million people, Taiwan has a population of around 24 million. Mainland China and territory controlled by the Chinese government is show in yellow, while territory claimed by, but not controlled by Beijing, including Taiwan, is depicted in brown on this map. Getty/iStock For decades leading up to the end of World War II, Taiwan was controlled by Japan. Then it became part of the Republic of China, a country ruled at the time by nationalists known as the Kuomintang. In 1949, after China's civil war, Mao Zedong and his communist forces took over the Chinese mainland and the Kuomintang movement, led by commander Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where they set up a rival government. The U.S. maintained formal diplomatic relations with that government rather than Beijing until 1978, when it recognized the ruling Communist Party as China's leadership and cut formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Taiwan has continued to function since then as a multi-party democracy, however, separate from China's communist government, and its domestic economy has flourished. Over time, people in Taiwan — especially younger generations — have increasingly come to view themselves and their island as separate from the...