Japanese Defense Report: China’s Military Supremacy Over Taiwan Growing ‘Rapidly’
Japan’s Defense Ministry: “China’s current external stance, military activities … present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge.”
China’s military supremacy over Taiwan is growing ‘rapidly,’ Japan’s defense ministry fears. The warning comes as China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducts aggressive air drills around the Island nation and the Communist Party renewed the call for the “reunification of our motherland” —a long-standing demand by Beijing to annex Taiwan.
Beijing’s military buildup poses a grave threat to Japan and the region, the Japanese defense planners believe. “China’s current external stance, military activities, and other activities have become a matter of serious concern for Japan and the international community, and present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge,” the 510-page annual report released Japan’s Defense Ministry warned.
Beijing is making a huge investment in building up its nuclear arsenal and conventional military might as part of the sweeping modernization of the PLA ordered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “Supported by the increase in its defense budget at a high level, China is extensively and rapidly enhancing its military capability, with focuses on its naval and air forces as well as its nuclear and missile forces,” the report added.
The Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported Friday:
The military balance between mainland China and Taiwan is “rapidly tilting to China’s favour,” Japan said in its annual defence report released on Friday, amid tensions over the self-ruled island that Beijing considers its territory.
The defence ministry’s 2023 white paper, received by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida the same day, said there is increasing global concern about China’s intensifying “coercive military activities” in the skies and waters surrounding Taiwan.
In last year’s report, Tokyo said that the military balance between Beijing and Taipei was “tilting to China’s favour, and the gap appears to be growing year by year.” (…)
A contingency involving Taiwan is a particularly concerning prospect for Japan, a US ally, given the proximity of its southwestern islands, including the Tokyo-controlled, Beijing-claimed Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. (…)
The latest report said that during the exercises, the Chinese military may have simulated operations for “invading Taiwan,” such as anti-ground and anti-ship attack drills, as well as those for gaining air and naval supremacy.
“The fact that China is capable of carrying out such activities shows that the situation is working to China’s advantage,” a defence ministry official told reporters.
The paper also cited a “significant increase” in the number of Chinese aircraft entering Taiwan’s airspace, rising from 972 in 2021 to 1,733 in 2022, as another sign of the shifting military balance.
The report described China as “a matter of serious concern” for the global community, saying the country presents the “greatest strategic challenge,” to which Japan should respond through “cooperation and collaboration” with the United States, as well as other “like-minded countries.”
China, Russia, and North Korea: The new axis threatens Asia
China’s growing military alliance with Russia is another source of worry for Japan and other U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the report. “Russia’s military activities in the Indo-Pacific region including Japan, together with its strategic coordination with China, are of strong security concern,” the report said.
According to the Japanese assessment, the emerging China-Russia-North Korea axis is the biggest military threat since the end of the Second World War. The Associated Press reported Friday:
China, Russia and North Korea contribute to “the most severe and complex security environment since the end of World War II,” according to the 510-page report. It says China’s external stance and military activities have become a “serious concern for Japan and the international community and present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge.” (…)
Russia and China have also stepped up strategic ties, the white paper said, noting five joint bomber flights since 2019, and several joint navigations of Chinese and Russian warships that it said were “clearly intended for demonstration of force against Japan and of grave concern” to both Japan and the region.
The Chinese threat is not limited to the Asia-Pacific region. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal and developing hypersonic missile technology to surpass U.S. capabilities.
Recent reports suggest that Beijing is setting up a high-tech listening post in Cuba, just 100 miles from the U.S. coast. “China and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, in a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S., according to U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence,” the Wall Street Journal reported last month.
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Comments
Something to understand is that China will not attack Taiwan unless we goad them into it.
The distance over the sea is five times larger then the distance of GB to French over the sea. They can do it but it would be very costly, and the wind up with a worthless rock when they are done.
Taiwan has been a thorn in their side for 70 years. They’ll invade the minute they think they can get away with it.
Kinda like we goaded the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941?
I agree it is daunting to do—but ChiComs are serious about doing it. The way to deter this is be prepared to make the risk of ChiCom disaster high.
That’s a flat-out lie. China currently lacks the means to invade, but would if it could. This isn’t a schoolyard squabble where one side can be “goaded.” The Chinese government is absolutely obsessed with Taiwan. The nation is a symbol of Chinese failure and of defiance against it. And its semiconductor factories are some of the biggest prizes on the planet.
The CPP has tried to take Taiwan Twice in my lifetime. There is a lot of history there.
And Taiwan includes Quemoy which is in artillery range..
The DOD is sending as many Pride flags as we can spare.
China has a narrow window to act before their own population decline. India is expected to surpass China’s population before many decades have passed. The other related point is the impact of the ‘one child’ policy. This resulted in wholesale abortion of females as Sons were seen as better able to support Parents in their old age.
This has created a huge population of ‘surplus males’. There won’t be a nice Chinese girl for most of them to marry b/c of the vast imbalance. These surplus males are of military age for the moment so China must expend them in a war(s) or exports them, perhaps to Africa with the belt and road program. A large excess population of military age males with no hope of family formation is not a stabilizing factor for domestic tranquility. Perhaps especially so in a totalitarian regime.
What is Mandarin for “cannon fodder?”
Not cannon fodder, but a barbarian force that will raze Taiwan and Japan to start kidnapping women.
Homeless dogs. They are served in fine Mandarin restaurants however, on the menu, they are listed as chicken so it won’t scare the tourists. Bats from Wuhan are also on the menu, but they are listed as Peking duck.
I used to be concerned about Chinese aggression until I learned that we have super sophisticated reverse-engineered alien space craft.
Another great comment by CommoChief.
On a related note, I have long argued that the Islamic tradition of polygamy is bad for young men, not so much so for young women. This typically leaves my interlocuter nonplussed.
Every man that takes four wives leaves three men out in the cold. Young men that cannot find wives are subject to the call of Jihad.
Erronius
India already passed China
India, according to estimates may have just passed China in population but is expected to do so this year. And that is if you believe the CCP’s figures. Some demographers claim they are overstating their population by about 100 million. In which case India passed it several years ago.
You may very well have more accurate figures. The last figures I saw was the crossing point would be NLT end of this decade with outside chance of staving it off for a another decade if China began mandating 3 children.
In any event the key point is that this surplus population of military age males is likely to be a destabilizing force domestically. They gotta either export them in a neo colonial venture or expend them in a war.
Hmm, Biden selling out an ally to the ChiComs?
Nahhhh…. what are the odds?
I can think of lots of Democrats that could be human shields….
Totally off topic, but there’s nowhere really appropriate to put it…
What’s with the mystery ads this week?
EVERY article, right up top, is monopolized by the same video ad: “Career opportunities in the USA.” It’s around a half hour video(!) made up of repetitions of a 5-minute message.
The message is: many foreign students (should?) come to the USA to take advantage of the best opportunities in the world to be educated in lucrative professional careers like doctor, dentist, or software developer. Each of these careers is then described (“What is a dentist?”), as if for the benefit of slow sixth-grader. Then the loop repeats.
There is no actual action solicited, no sales pitch, and no advertiser identified (well, maybe at the very end of all the loops, which I was not going to wait for, since you cannot skip ahead in the video).
Ostensibly pointless “advertising” makes my tinfoil hat ring.
I see it too, but the ad doesn’t auto play on safari.
Briefly as possible. Whatever you did regarding archive.org and their fascistic censorship had a profound effect. The unidexed penal server(s) is now indexed on google search. Jason Scott changed his penal colony ABOUT page description – he literally co-opted parts of my Woke Cancel Culture page. Hilarious. He also took vengeance on my ARK account, No matter, I don’t care. Their lives are virtually bound to their cyber lives and think others are bound in the same way. Mine isn’t. They can’t hurt me in any fashion.
YOU made change. A huge change. ARK made a system wide change I won’t elaborate on. Incredible. You scared them in a profound way. Me? I did nothing other than pose as unwitting stalking horse. I bow to you. $#&* BRAVO!
Thanks for letting me know. I guess next time he hits me up for a donation I should thank him for correcting “our previous problem” and send him some coin.
The only thing I did other than relay your complaint was to observe to them that their “Off Center and Outsider / Passages and Writings from outside the mainstream of thought” quarantine section contained ‘works like Edward Bernays’ “Propaganda,” Walter Block’s “A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration,” the Baltimore Catechism, and even Solzhenitsyn’s titanic classic “Gulag Archipelago”,’ and asked them under what possible criteria they could justify this.
Ostensibly pointless “advertising” makes my tinfoil hat ring.<<<<
I’m a bit slow on the uptake. You think there’s something intrinsically nefarious regarding the ad. You’re probably right but hope you’re wrong about that.
My security knowledge extends to “don’t click on stuff.”
This “ad” is so un-adly that it doesn’t even take you anywhere when you click on it. All that does is stop and start the video.
This is like the Q of ads — inscrutable.
There is no way to make money off this “ad,” but putting it at the top of every page must be costing the advertiser a mint.
Follow the money?
Japan is making noises about wanting to remilitarize as we allowed Germany to. We can never allow this. During the war they proved themselves ruthless savages, and only the dropping of two atomic bombs on an all but defeated country saved a quarter million American casualties that would have ensued from the planned invasion of Japan.
Japan has already quietly remilitarized. Their “Self Defense Force” is a high-tech and well-trained force. And Imperial Japan is long gone. They’ve undergone a profound cultural shift.
But I’m curious about how we “couldn’t allow” it. Do you believe we rule Japan? If they decided to fully remilitarize to Imperial levels what could we do to stop it?
We still call the shots and have very substantial military bases and troops stationed in Japan. How many bases and troops do the Japanese have here? They are not permitted nuclear weapons. We wrote their constitution, and they rely on us for protection. We still, in effect, rule. But, in recent years they have sought more than the minimal self defense assets we have permitted. Their self defense is entirely under the U.S. umbrella, and it is a joint operation.
So let me get this straight… your response is that we should use the military we have on Japanese soil (which is there because of treaties both parties have signed) to enforce our will on Japan? That seems kind of… evil. All they have to do to foil that is tear up the treaties and tell our military to get the hell out. If we don’t then we’ve gone from allies to invaders.
You’re not exactly making a great case. On one hand you claim that we’re responsible for their defense, but on the other you’re claiming that we have the power to enforce our will on Japan AND SHOULD DO SO. That’s a Mafia deal… “Be a shame if anything happened to your island.” Seems like in that case then the defense they need is against us.
And you didn’t address my other point. Is Japan the same country culturally as it was during the Imperial period?
A Chinese attack on Taiwan would be bad for the environment and the climate..
They can’t do it.
Discussion closed.
Sarcasm done!