Taipei: Allan Chi responds matter-of-factly when asked how far his company’s drones can strike. They could reach Shanghai, China’s most populated urban area, 680 kilometres from the Taiwanese capital of Taipei.
“We know that Taiwan needs something like long-distance attack drones that can attack cities in China from Taiwan,” Chi says. “It has to travel a long distance.” He notes, with a sense of regret, that even his company’s most advanced drones cannot reach as far the Chinese capital of Beijing.
Chi works at Thunder Tiger, a company that started out in the late 1970s making remote-controlled toys. It has now pivoted hard into making weapons of war. The impetus was the war in Ukraine, which has demonstrated the transformative role of drones in modern conflict.
Iran’s use of drones to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, frustrating the United States and Israel’s hopes of regime change, have only underscored their importance.
A key point of difference for Thunder Tiger is its “non-red” supply chain, which means between 95 and 99 per cent of its drone parts are sourced from outside mainland China. This is no small feat given China’s dominant role in global manufacturing. Blacklisting China makes the drones more expensive, but Chi says the restriction is essential to ensure Taiwan can keep its production lines if a war breaks out with its powerful neighbour.
In case there were any doubts, Chi is not hankering for a fight with China. To seek war with a nuclear-armed superpower of 1.4 billion people would be irrational for Taiwan, a tiny island of 23 million people that is not officially recognised by the vast majority of the world’s nations, including Australia.
Despite the signs pointing to air raid shelters plastered across buildings in Taipei, there is no sense of panic on the streets. Locals and tourists jostle to find the best bubble tea, Xiaolongbao soup dumplings and oyster omelettes at the city’s renowned night markets.
Life, in so many ways, is good. The Economist ranks Taiwan the 15th most democratic country in the world, just below Australia and Japan. It was the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. Fuelled by its strength in advanced technologies like semiconductors and artificial intelligence, Taiwan recorded a remarkable economic growth rate of 8.7 per cent last year, above China (5 per cent), the United States (2.1 per cent) and Australia (2 per cent).
But given Chinese President Xi Jinping’s view that Taiwan is an integral part of Chinese territory that must be united with the mainland, the threat of war cannot be ignored. Taiwan hopes it can festoon the island with enough potent weapons to prevent China from launching an invasion (known in military circles as the “porcupine strategy”). It is also counting on foreign support to help deter Xi from gambling on war, most importantly, a steady flow of military aid from the US.
That support has been thrown into doubt by US President Donald Trump’s May visit to Beijing to meet with Xi. Ratcheting up existing fears he could cast aside support for Taiwan for a grand bargain deal with China, Trump told Fox News at the end of his trip that he was suspending a promised delivery of $US14 billion ($20 billion) worth of weapons to Taiwan. “It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” Trump said of the arms sales.
In an apparent reference to Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, Trump declared that “they have somebody there now that wants to go independent” and that “they’re going independent because they want to get into a war and they figure they have the United States behind them”. Lai has repeatedly said he has no intention of declaring independence, but Beijing has portrayed him as a dangerous separatist.
A few days later, Trump indicated he was prepared to toss aside diplomatic norms aside to speak to Lai in what would be the first call between sitting US and Taiwanese presidents since 1979. “We’ll work on that Taiwan problem,” he said.
I was in Taipei when Trump made this declaration, visiting as part of a week-long study tour for 15 international journalists organised and funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There are obvious limitations to such trips; the itinerary is designed to showcase Taiwan at its best.
But I learnt not only about Taiwan’s strengths but its flaws and complexities – from xenophobia (opposition to immigration from India was a flashpoint during my visit) to the political divisions holding back the island’s efforts to bolster its defences. With Taiwan’s relationship with its most important security partner in flux, it was a fraught and fascinating time to visit.
During an interview at the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Taipei, Deputy Foreign Minister Chen Ming-chi admits that Trump’s visit to Beijing has created a “certain kind of anxiety” within the government.
Trump’s Fox News interview, he says, gave the worrying impression that Beijing’s efforts to influence Trump’s thinking were paying off. Still, he expresses confidence that the promised US arms sales will eventually go ahead because of their importance to maintaining peace in the region and strong bipartisan support for Taiwan in the US Congress.
Chen’s fellow deputy minister Wu Chih-chung was clearly frustrated by Trump’s remarks. “We don’t have a Taiwan problem, we just have a solution here in Taiwan,” declares the voluble diplomat, who previously represented Taiwan in France. The real “troublemaker”, Wu argues, is the superpower on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. “China is trying to destroy the status quo, to conquer Taiwan, to dominate the world.”
Moving on to Trump’s attacks on Taiwan’s president, he says: “Donald Trump just said that he opposed any declaration of Taiwan independence here, but we will not declare independence.” It would be an act of masochism, Wu says, to provoke China in such a way when Taiwan already holds democratic elections, issues its own currency, hands out Taiwanese passports and boasts a booming economy.
Showing a flair for debate, he argues that Taiwan is more independent today than Australia was until at least the 1980s, when legislation removed Britain’s ability to legislate with effect in Australia. “Personally for me, my country is a sovereign country. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a sovereign country,” he says. “Two sovereign countries don’t have a problem of unification.”
Such comments infuriate officials from the Chinese Communist Party, whose bedrock “One China principle” states there is only one China in the world, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and the the PRC is the only legal government representing the entire Chinese people. China’s ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian stated last year that “Taiwan is a province of China, just as Tasmania is a state of Australia”.
Complicating this claim is the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan. Japan ruled the island from 1895 until the end of World War II. The remnants of China’s anti-communist regime, the Kuomintang, fled to Taiwan after losing control of the mainland, and operated a harsh dictatorship until a transition to democracy in the 1990s. The Kuomintang survives today as one of Taiwan’s two main parties. It favours a more conciliatory approach to Beijing and has imposed sweeping cuts to defence spending, including on the nascent domestic drone industry.
Largely because of fear of blowback from Beijing, just 11 countries now have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Taiwanese passport holders are not allowed to enter the United Nations headquarters in New York, and Taiwan’s participation in all manner of international forums is banned or restricted. Such is the state of limbo in which Taiwan finds itself today. Prosperous yet precarious; politically isolated yet economically intertwined with the rest of the world.
Chinese officials say their preference is for “peaceful reunification” between Taiwan and the mainland, with suggestions of a “one country, two systems” similar to that in Hong Kong. But a Chinese anti-secession law passed in 2005 states that Beijing can use force if Taiwan declares independence or all options for peaceful reunification are exhausted.
US intelligence officials have claimed that Xi has instructed his military leadership to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027, but this timeline has never been confirmed by China. The consensus we find in Taiwan is that a full-scale invasion is not regarded as an imminent threat. Despite China’s massive military advances, launching an amphibious assault across the 130 kilometres of the Taiwan Strait would be a dicey undertaking.
“In the next five years, we do not think that China would use military force against Taiwan because…the risks and the cost would be way too high for China,” says Luo Wen-jia, secretary-general of the Straits Exchange Foundation, a semi-official organisation set up to handle Taiwan’s relations with China. “So instead they would opt for other means with lower costs and lower risks.”
The bigger short-term threat, Luo says, is China’s efforts to shape Taiwanese thinking using bots, disinformation and Chinese-controlled media. “This is aimed at using the openness and democracy of Taiwan to influence the mindset of the Taiwanese people,” he says. “Taiwan is the biggest target for China’s cognitive warfare.”
We hear the same at the Taipei headquarters of the Kuma Academy, a civil defence organisation whose aim is to foster a “prepare a pre-war mentality for civilians”. The non-profit runs missile attack drills to simulate an invasion, teaches its students how to stockpile supplies for a long war and use tourniquets to bind wounds. But its immediate focus is on “information warfare”, including countering pro-Chinese messages spread on social media and identifying pro-Beijing spies and infiltrators.
Among the officials and experts we meet, there is a widespread view that Xi’s sweeping purge of the Chinese military leadership – including the removal of some of his top generals this year – has likely delayed any plans to attack Taiwan.
“I think it’s a little bit about timing adjustment,” Deputy Foreign Minister Chen Ming-chi says. He adds that a risky full-scale invasion is just one option in Beijing’s repertoire. Xi could also try to seize one of Taiwan’s smaller outer islands or impose some form of economic blockade.
The ultimate victory for Xi, he says, would be to convince the Taiwanese to submit without the Chinese military having to fire a shot.“We always say that there are two scenarios: one is a D-Day scenario, the other one is a day-to-day scenario. So we have to deal with both.”
Matthew Knott travelled to Taiwan, with over a dozen other international journalists, as part of a tour organised and funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X, Facebook or email.