China should be worried about how Russia fared in the early days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a senior Pentagon official has said, as Taiwan says Beijing is deploying its largest naval force in several decades close to the U.S.-supported island.
“Moscow’s early battlefield struggles should be deeply concerning for Beijing,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, said during a speech at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on Tuesday. This is especially true, Hicks said, as China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is “far less experienced at modern warfare than the Russian military.”
“The PLA hasn’t fought a war in 40 years,” Hicks said. In the late 1970s, China invaded Vietnam, whereas Russia had been involved in Ukraine prior to 2022, as well as in operations in its southern Chechen region, in Georgia in 2008, and formally waded into the Syrian Civil War in 2015.
Moscow and Beijing have a “no limits” partnership, declared just days before Russian troops poured over the border into Ukraine in February 2022. But Chinese President Xi Jinping has supported its ally while saying Beijing is pushing for peace talks, throughout the nearly three years of full-scale war.
An unnamed Taiwanese official told Reuters on Monday that nearly 90 naval and coastguard ships were close to Taiwan, the East and South China Seas and southern Japanese islands. Taipei’s Defense Ministry separately said on Monday that the Chinese military had designated several chunks of airspace close to Taiwan as reserved.
Taipei had “initiated combat readiness exercises and will closely monitor the situation,” Taiwan’s government said, raising the island’s alert level.
Taiwan said on Tuesday that China had deployed its largest naval force close to the self-governing island more than 100 miles from Chinese mainland in nearly 30 years. Lieutenant General Hsieh Jih-sheng, a senior Taiwanese defense official, said on Tuesday that 21 Chinese ships had been detected that day close to Taiwan.
China views Taiwan as a breakaway province destined to be reunited with the mainland, including by force. Beijing is critical of the U.S. support for the Taiwanese, who elect their own government independently of China. Washington officially conforms to the one China policy, but says it has a “robust unofficial relationship” with Taipei.
Hicks said Washington had “sharpened our focus” on the Indo-Pacific in the past four years, as well as beefing up its capabilities in the region. The U.S. considers China to be what the Pentagon has called the “pacing threat,” and helped establish the AUKUS alliance between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in fall 2021.
European officials say they expect the region to dominate U.S. attention even more in the coming years.
Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Monday that “there is no such thing as ‘Taiwan’s ministry of defense,’” adding: “Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory.”
“China will firmly defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Mao said.
Xi said late last year that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is “inevitable.”
“If the PRC were to pursue aggression against a neighbor, it would likely find what Russia found in Ukraine: that both sides must be prepared for a drawn-out, protracted fight—where the costs for all only go up over time,” Hicks said, referring to China by its official title, the People’s Republic of China.
The Kremlin had hoped to execute a blitz invasion of Ukraine in a handful of days. Nearly three years later, Russia has sustained more than 700,000 casualties, according to Western and Ukrainian estimates, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian fighters thought to be killed and injured.
Hicks said China would have a harder time attempting to bring Taiwan under its control through a difficult amphibious landing than Russia—which shares an extensive land border with Ukraine—had in early 2022.
“While the PRC claims there are no similarities, we know they’re watching this war closely,” Hicks said.
“It’s clear why Beijing is watching this war closely: because, after almost three years, we have seen the character of warfare change,” Hicks added.
The war in Ukraine has been a crucible for the lightning-pace development of new technology, not least drones and electronic warfare.
“Ukraine’s example of resistance and innovation against an aggressor should also be appreciated clearly—on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, and elsewhere,” Hicks said.
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