Dharamshala, 8th March: Taiwan’s foreign minister warned on Monday that if China views the United States’ response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “weak,” the democratic island may be invaded. On the 12th day of the Russian invasion, Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu said, “I believe that China’s leaders are … watching the situation and trying to draw their own conclusions, the danger is that if they believe that the West’s response to the Russian invasion is weak, and lacks impact, they could take that as a positive sign [for an invasion of Taiwan]”.
Taiwan, which was ruled by the authoritarian Kuomintang government after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and later transitioned to democracy in the 1990s, has never been ruled by the Communist Party of China and has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China.
A Taiwanese man from the central city of Taichung posted his ID on Twitter, claiming he was willing to go to Ukraine and fight, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed for international volunteers to join the armed resistance against Russia. Wu said his ministry is keeping a careful eye on China’s next move, as well as the situation in Ukraine, which he described as “inspiring” to many in Taiwan.
China’s Ministry of Finance presented the National People’s Congress with a draught budget of 1.45 trillion yuan, up 7.1 percent year on year and the largest rise in military spending since 2019. Lin Ying-yu, a Taiwan military expert, believes the genuine figure is likely far higher.
Military funding has more than doubled since CCP general secretary Xi Jinping took power in 2012, according to Su Tze-Yun of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Su estimates that by 2030, China could have 1,000 nuclear warheads.
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