China launched its most extensive war games around Taiwan on Monday to showcase Beijing’s ability to cut off the island from outside support in a conflict, testing Taipei’s resolve to defend itself and its arsenal of U.S.-made weapons.
The Eastern Theatre Command said it had deployed troops, warships, fighter jets and artillery for its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises to encircle the democratically governed island, conduct live fire and simulated strikes on land and sea targets, and drills to blockade Taiwan’s main ports.
The live-firing exercises will continue on Tuesday across a record seven zones designated by China’s Maritime Safety Administration, making the drills the largest to date by total coverage and in areas closer to Taiwan than previous exercises. The military had initially said artillery firing would be confined to five zones.
The main argument of the PRC is there is one China, the ROC was the government of that China, the PRC succeeded the ROC as the sole legitimate government of all Chinese territory in 1949. Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire (sovereignty given to Japan by Qing China) for the entirety of the ROC’s lifetime in China, the ROC given administrative rights to Taiwan at the Treaty of San Francisco.
Taiwan giving up those de-jure territorial claims implies Taiwan is a separate entity, the civil war framework dissolves, since there’s no longer a competing government claiming to represent China, just two separate countries, and the succession of states logic breaks.
The moment Taiwan says “we don’t claim the mainland anymore, we just claim Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, …,” it’s a de facto independence declaration.
This is seen by the PRC as sedition and, again, by law, the PRC must intervene militarily to prevent that.
Again, I specifically mentioned: “territorial claims over lands outside de-facto PRC”. Taiwan could maintain its claims over the mainland but give up those over the “Greater China” without implying it’s a separate entity. It’s not the PRC’s business whether Taiwan claims Mongolia.
The current status quo framework is based on the civil war claims, even the slightest deviation from this framework is seen as a red line by the PRC, to the degree that Chen Shui-bian was seen as a diehard independence figure for simply using Taiwan instead of ROC in national day addresses.
Looking at practical implications, where Taiwan hopes to maintain a status quo until the PRC’s window of opportunity for annexation fades away, why would Taiwan say “yeah we don’t claim the ROC territory, we claim exactly the territories of today’s PRC”, thereby strengthening the PRCs argument for annexing Taiwan?
They could reduce their claims of “Greater China”, for example, to gain international recognition. Quite sure Mongolia and Pakistan would be happy to hear such news. But yeah, I guess to you, China, the country that hasn’t carried out any military invasion in 40+ years, has a hair trigger when it comes the invasion of Taiwan somehow?