Taiwan is preparing to increase its overall military spending by almost 14% next year. This is the plan of the government and President Tsai Ing-wen, while China has carried out particularly intense military exercises around the island in recent weeks after the visit to Taiwan by the leader of the American deputies, Nancy Pelosi.
Taiwan announced this Thursday, August 25 to plan an increase in its military budget. ” To protect national security, the overall defense budget for next year will reach Tw586.3 billion, a record high said a spokesperson, quoting Prime Minister Su Tseng-chang.
Taipei has proposed a new military budget of 415.1 billion Taiwan dollars (13.7 billion euros) for next year, an increase of 13% compared to last year. This record sum must be approved by Parliament. A special budget will also be allocated in particular to the acquisition of fighter planes, said the body in charge of budgets, in a press release.
Despite this increase in military spending, Taiwan is still divided on the strategy to adopt against the Chinese giant. ” When we talk about Taiwan there is always this question: does it have to provide itself in terms of armament that would allow it to resist a ground invasion? Does it have to have an armament which consists first of protecting itself from a missile attack? Should it indeed simply develop asymmetric weapons? », contextualizes Jean-Yves Heurtebise, lecturer at Fu-Jen Catholic University in Taiwan.
Fear of Chinese military intervention
” What the example of Ukraine seems to have shown in terms of armaments is that a large number of small armaments were better than in fact a small number of very expensive weapons which can be destroyed easily, like planes by missiles, contextualizes Jean-Yves Heurtebise, at the microphone of RFI. So, there is always this question, are we simply going to favor an asymmetrical defense? Or do we try to have equal skill levels despite everything? Taiwan hesitated between one side or the other, at the level of the military budget. This is something that is still under discussion. »
Beijing considers the island of Taiwan to be part of its territory, and Taipei fears that China will intervene militarily. The military maneuvers large-scale measures undertaken this month by China – following the visit of the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States Nancy Pelosi in Taipei – accentuated the tensions in the Taiwan Strait at their highest level in years, heightening fears that Beijing will use force to take control of the island it considers its own.
The noise of Beijing’s boots intensified under President Xi Jinping, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proved that verbal threats from a neighboring authoritarian power could become concrete. Taipei remains very much outnumbered vis-à-vis Beijing, with only 88,000 ground forces against one million for China, according to Pentagon estimates. The territory has modernized its aging fighter fleet in recent years amid growing fears of military action by China and continued pressure from more frequent Chinese incursions into its Air Defense Identification Zone (Adiz). .
Last year, Taiwan recorded around 950 Chinese warplane incursions into its air defense zone, according to a database compiled by AFP, more than double the roughly 380 in 2020.