With the world distracted, China intimidates Taiwan

THE TANKS queued patiently with the cars, delivery trucks and bright yellow taxis before rolling serenely through the traffic lights. The drill, in Yuanshan, a town south-east of Taipei, was intended as practice at repelling a Chinese invasion. Some of the tanks, covered in webbing, hid in a copse, about as inconspicuously as is possible for a 50-tonne vehicle. The unit had good reason to be rehearsing. In recent months China has been rattling more sabres than usual at Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory. With covid-19 subsiding in China but consuming America, some in Taiwan feel vulnerable.

China sends around 2,000 bomber patrols a year into the Taiwan Strait, which separates the two countries, according to Taiwan’s defence minister. These are taking increasingly menacing routes. In 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen, an opponent of reunification with China, was first elected Taiwan’s president, China began sending bombers to circumnavigate the island as a show of force. Last year it deliberately sent fighters across the mid-point of the strait for the first time in two decades. In December China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, the Shandong, was sent through the strait two weeks before Taiwan’s presidential election, in which Ms Tsai won a second four-year term.

China has not let...

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