The drill, according to the Chinese Coast Guard, was a “practical action to control Taiwan island in accordance with the law based on the one-China principle.”
Observers suggested that the presence of coast guard vessels, dedicated to domestic law enforcement activities, signaled that China was buttressing its claim that Taiwan was Chinese territory.
Beijing maintains that the island has been an “inalienable” part of China since time immemorial. The People’s Republic has never exercised control over Taiwan. In fact, no Chinese regime has ever held indisputable sovereignty to it. Chiang Kai-shek, the first Chinese ruler to exercise control of the whole island, arrived in 1949.
Taiwan officials have told visiting foreigners that they expect Beijing to impose a quarantine over the island republic in the coming months.
“With Joint Sword, the Communist Party of China is developing and finalizing their quarantine concept for Taiwan,” John Mills, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Gatestone. “They know a blockade is an act of war, so they’re playing the quarantine game, modeled after what President Kennedy did in 1963 for Cuba.
“When the Chinese initiate their quarantine, they will target vessels carrying weapons shipments, such as the recent one that ferried Harpoon missiles. They will also target civil aircraft carrying personalities that they want to render to Chinese control. Undersea cables will also likely be cut.”
When will this happen? There is wide disagreement. Mills believes that the Chinese could declare their quarantine this year or soon after.
A quarantine is a cunning maneuver at a time when China is not prepared for a full-scale war and is not ready to start hostilities by launching an invasion of Taiwan’s main island.
Not prepared? Chinese leader Xi Jinping does not trust the Chinese military, a war on Taiwan would be extremely unpopular with the Chinese people, and the Chinese regime is extremely casualty averse.
Xi, therefore, is trying to intimidate everyone else into submission.
Chang Ching of the R.O.C. Society for Strategic Studies, who examined the track of Russian and Chinese vessels before Joint Sword-2024B, told Fox: “They were using a very old Chinese strategy called ‘encircling the point/striking the reinforcement. The real target is the United States.
“[They were] practicing ways to ambush the U.S. Navy if it heads toward an already held-hostage Taiwan.”
Xi may think he can take Taiwan with just a quarantine, which is not an act of war, but the risk for him is that if the move fails, he has to move to a full blockade, which is. The Chinese military announced that Joint Sword-2024B practices a “key port blockade.” A quarantine, therefore, could start a chain of events that leads to conflict.
For a blockade to be successful, it will almost certainly have to include sovereign Japanese territory, specifically the island of Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost inhabited territory. Taiwan’s mountains are visible from this small island south of Taipei. The United States has a mutual defense treaty with Japan, which means that once China declares a blockade, the resulting war will pull in the United States.
If Xi’s quarantine fails, he cannot back down. At the moment, only the most belligerent answers are considered acceptable in senior Communist Party circles. The extreme hostility suggests that something is wrong in the Chinese capital, so the world should be prepared for anything, at any place, and at any time.
Xi urged the missile troops to, among other things, sharpen “combat capabilities.”
Xi’s implied threats to use these weapons are particularly ominous. We have to ask ourselves: When in history has a militant regime engaged in belligerent acts and constantly threatened to go to war but did not actually do so?
Nothing is inevitable, but now there is an almost irresistible momentum to war.
