China is seriously preparing for the invasion of Taiwan, according to Grant Newsham, a retired Marine colonel and senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies.
Beijing’s actions came as the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military announced on April 8 that it was beginning three days of combat readiness patrols and “Joint Sword” exercises around Taiwan, involving police patrols.
During the drills, dozens of Chinese warplanes were spotted crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan’s southwest ADIZ.
“They’ve effectively said that this mutually agreed-upon demarcation line down the middle of the Taiwan Strait … doesn’t matter, and [they] don’t recognize it, and they are now flying their aircraft across it all the time,” Newsham recently told “China in Focus” on NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.
“It all is intended to build up Chinese capabilities to launch an effective and successful attack on Taiwan,” Newsham said. “So everything you’re seeing here is not a one-shot deal where China is just flexing its muscles to get Taiwan to sort of back off a bit or get the Americans to back off,” he added.
Much as a baseball team goes through Spring training before the real season begins, he said, the CCP is warming up for a real war.
“This is all much more significant than just a few-day exercise,” he noted, urging “We should take the Chinese seriously.”
Newsham pointed to China’s launch of five missiles reportedly landing in Japan’s exclusive economic zone during its live-fire drills around Taiwan following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to the island in August 2022.
Testing Reaction
He predicted that next fall, the communist regime will practice an actual landing exercise for the actual invasion.“It’s part of a sequence of steps by the Chinese to build up their capabilities to attack Taiwan, but also at the same time they’re testing Taiwan’s reaction, testing America’s reaction, the international community’s reaction and the Europeans reaction as well,” he said.
In his opinion, the CCP can not tolerate the freedom of the island as Taiwan is “functioning as a very good healthy democracy, consensual government, freedom of the press, freedom of speech.”
As such, it is considered a threat to the CCP, which rules its own people by force.
Given the island’s strategic location, controlling the island would allow the Chinese military to operate freely, swing up north, surround Japan, swing down to the south. It could then isolate Australia from America and the rest of Asia.
Blow to US prestige
Newsham said that the loss of Taiwan to China would be a blow to the U.S. prestige.“If Taiwan is allowed to be enslaved, it shows that the American military with all its might couldn’t keep Taiwan free, shows that American economic and political financial power couldn’t prevent China from taking Taiwan,” he contended.
“Nobody on earth is going to take American promises of support and protection seriously, after that, it would just be a huge blow to America and everything it stands for,” he said.
“It’s entirely a charade by the Chinese, but it does tend to present them as peacemakers,” he noted.
“And the Chinese play on this all the time, arguing that, ‘well, America’s democracy, Western values, these are useless, these are not good. And the Chinese approach, the communist approach is the better one, it’s the ascendant one, the Americans are on the downswing,’” he said.
“So we are in a political fight, a psychological fight as much as a military one,” Newsham said.
