"Quemoy and Matsu" Watch: When will the People's Republic of China invade Taiwan? Tomorrow? Next week? (Wait, what??!!)

Lord knows I wouldn't want to contribute in the tiniest way to some war contractor missing out on a few dollars of additional profit.

But the current hype over China invading Taiwan really needs to be taken with not just a bit of skepticism, but large quantities of it.

The saga of Quemoy and Matsu

This talk this year has reminded me of the controversy over "Quemoy and Matsu," islands in the Taiwan Strait that the People's Republic of China contested with the Taiwanese government in the 1950s. Mao Zedong's government did take moves in 1958 to test the position of the US. Donald Zagoria describes that action in The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961 (1962):

Several elements contributed to the Chinese Communist decision to launch a venture in the Taiwan Strait in August of 1958. First, the West was preoccupied with the Middle East crisis [aka, the Lebanon crisis], a fact which was probably central in the timing of the venture. Second, the Chinese believed that they had an unbeatable hand. The evidence strongly suggests they never intended to launch a frontal assault on any of the offshore islands, but believed that, by interdiction, they could force the Quemoy garrison to surrender - a surrender which, in time, would lead to the automatic collapse of the other offshore islands. The Chinese seemed to base their calculations on a judgment widely held in the West: that once air and sea interdiction became effective the offshore islands could not be supplied, unless Nationalist and American forces were prepared to bomb the coastal provinces on the Chinese mainland. [my emphasis]

In that 1962 analysis, Zagoria goes through the various factors that seemed to affect China's decision to engage in the provocation, including, "Mao probably believed sincerely that the West needed to be given a sobering lesson in brinkmanship in return for its intervention in the Middle East."

The Chinese action was also "a calculated Chinese Communist probe of U.S. intentions." The idea was to interdict supplies going to Quemoy and the Matsu island chain and get an indication of how far the US and its allies would go to block a takeover of the islands, which in themselves had negligible strategic value to the US.

The plan didn't work. The People's Republic was unable to establish and effective blockade. Since "it did become feasible to supply the offshore islands without bombing the Chinese mainland," the West didn't even have to take further major military measures. And Zagoria adds:

Most analysts now seem agreed that the Chinese Communists never intended to invade the offshore islands. The artillery shelling began immediately before the typhoon season, when amphibious operations would have been precarious. The amphibious lift necessary for an invasion was never brought into the coastal areas. Communist air capability was used with great restraint throughout the crisis. Quemoy, for example, was not bombed by aircraft. In sum, the whole venture seemed to be a classic example of brinkmanship. [my emphasis]

This kind of mutual testing and jockeying is routine among adversary powers. They can, of course, get out of hand if one or both sides are making serious miscalculations.

"Quemoy and Matsu" was one of the hot topics debated in the 1960 Presidential race, with John Kennedy warning about the dangerous weakness the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had been showing on the issue. (Although it was a very murky issue; JFK praised Eisenhower for seeking to persuade Taiwan to abandon the islands because of their lack of strategic significance and criticized Nixon for not supporting that position.) The phrase has since become a synonym for a wildly overblown problem. But in 1958-1960, those islands that most Americans couldn't have located on an unlabeled map if their lives depended on it were discussed as though the fate of the world hung on whether the Taiwanese government or the mainline Chinese government controlled them.

Warmongering like it's 1958

Fred Kaplan gives some valuable background for current gloom-and-doom warnings that China is itching to invade Taiwan at any moment in Will China Really Invade Taiwan? Slate 11/09/2021. An important moment in the current hype was this, "In March, Adm. Philip Davidson, the outgoing commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, told a Senate panel that China posed a 'manifest' threat of invading Taiwan 'in the next six years.'" Kaplan notes:

Davidson did not clear his March testimony with the secretary of defense (something that officers are supposed to do, especially if they’re about to make provocative statements). Nor did his warning of a Chinese invasion “in the next six years” reflect any estimate by the U.S. intelligence community.

With a relative weak peace movement and a pitifully bipartisan attitude of deference to the Pentagon at the moment, such claims easily become part of the conventional wisdom of the moment.

But Kaplan, for one, isn't willing to leave it there_

At the same time, a debate has erupted among more scholarly analysts over whether China’s Communist leaders really want to invade Taiwan - and, if they do, whether the Chinese military is capable of doing so now or in the near future. With few exceptions, the pessimists tend to be military officers, who measure the balance of power by which side has more or less of what sorts of weapons systems, while the less-panicked tend to be experts on China’s history and politics who view the statistics in a broader context.

.... In fact, the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military power - while citing accelerating, and worrisome, trends in the production of Chinese ships, missiles, and nuclear weapons - downplays concerns about China’s ability or desire to mount and sustain an invasion of Taiwan. [my emphasis]

One final comment: Scare stories around China-Taiwan have pointed to more incidents of Chinese incursion into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). Our major media are often too lazy to explain that ADIZ is not the same as national airspace. National airspace is counted as part of a country's ADIZ. But there is a broader category of "offshorte ADIZ," which 17 nations currently employ, including Taiwan and the People's Republic. This category of ADIZs "usually do not amount to sovereignty claims over the open airspace outside national airspace or involve threat or use of force." (Jinyuan Su, Is the Establishment of Air Defence Identification Zones Outside National Airspace in Accordance with International Law? European Journal of International Law 11/18/2021)

So it's worth paying attention in reports of these incidents to ask whether they involve clear incursions in sovereign airspace. It's a real distinction and an important one:

The ADIZ extends hundreds of kilometers from Taiwan's coast and even includes parts of mainland China. It is much larger than Taiwan's sovereign air space, which only extends 12 nautical miles from the coast.

The ADIZ is airspace designated for national security purposes but is not delineated in international treaties. Taiwanese authorities reserve the right to order aircraft entering the ADIZ to identify themselves and their purpose. (Taiwan says 16 Chinese warplanes enter air defense zone Deutsche Welle 07.11.2021)

Other sources:

• Pentagon annual report to Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republican of China 2021
• Adrian Ang U-Jin and Olli Pekka Suorsa, Explaining the PLA’s Record-Setting Air Incursions Into Taiwan’s ADIZ The Diplomat 11/14/2021
• BBC News, China-Taiwan military tensions 'worst in 40 years' The Diplomat 11/06/2021
• Jared McKinney and Peter Harris, Broken Nest: Deterring China fr en Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 2021. ("While the United States no doubt has a strong interest in deterring a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, relying on the latent threat of a great-power war is the wrong approach.")
• Lindsay Maizland, Why China-Taiwan Relations Are So Tense Council on Foreign Relations 05/10/2021