Taiwan’s outlying islands are the most at risk of CCP aggression, but experts are divided on how to defend them.
Residents of Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands can see the towers of China’s Xiamen even on a cloudy day.
It was in Kinmen, just 4 miles from mainland China, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to wipe out its opposition before it fled to Taiwan during the closing phases of a brutal civil war 75 years ago.
It was in Kinmen, on Aug. 23, that Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said the people of Taiwan will not submit to the CCP today.
“Taiwan is a country that ardently loves peace,” Lai said.
“We are no longer trying to retake the mainland. But we are also unwilling to be ruled by the Communist Party. We want to continue a life of democracy, freedom, human rights, and rule of law.”
Though 75 years have passed since CCP leader Mao Zedong tried and failed to exterminate his opposition here, the embers of that conflict remain and are threatening to flicker to life once again.
Even as Lai delivered his message of peace, the CCP’s military conducted maneuvers in the skies and seas around Kinmen, underscoring what Taiwan’s government says are clear efforts to undermine regional peace and stability.
For residents of Kinmen, that threat is as real as ever. Though they can see mainland China, they are more than 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan, and the number of Chinese vessels in the waters around their islands grows with every passing month.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard says it expelled 835 Chinese vessels from Taiwan-controlled waters in the first six months of the year. The brewing crisis led Taiwan Defense Minister Wellington Koo to warn that China was trying to establish a new norm of control around Kinmen’s waters.
That presence also puts Kinmen and other island chains like it at a unique risk of a surprise attack from the CCP.
Li Xiaobing, a professor of history at the University of Central Oklahoma, says that Mao initiated the first and second Taiwan Strait crises in 1954 and 1958 by launching artillery attacks on Kinmen and the nearby Matsu Islands.
Mao’s thinking, Li told The Epoch Times, was that by confining the violence to quick, “local wars” for minor islands, the CCP could deter the United States from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
Though Mao ultimately failed to take the islands, the strategy proved effective in preventing the United States from joining the hostilities.
Now, Li says, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is learning from that history and could seek to swiftly seize outlying islands one at a time rather than initiate a full-scale war for Taiwan proper.
“Because of the quick victory, it would make any foreign naval intervention very difficult, if not impossible,” Li said.
“The Chinese navy could achieve a victory at the early stages of those local wars to show naval capability, to justify Xi Jinping’s third term, and to scare or deter any foreign, but especially U.S. intervention.”
Local Wars
The CCP claims that Taiwan is part of its dominion and must be united with the mainland, though the regime has never actually controlled Taiwan’s island territories.
Xi rose to a historic third term as CCP leader by positioning himself as the man who would make that unification a reality. He has ordered the CCP’s military wing to develop the capabilities to conquer Taiwan by 2027.
For all its growth, however, the Chinese navy might not be up for that task, Li said, and Xi has had to quell several crises in the military as senior naval leadership disagreed with the prospect of conquering Taiwan outright.
“Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait became a testing ground of the Chinese leader and the PLA from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping and now Xi Jinping,” Li said, using the acronym for the People’s Liberation Army, the regime’s military.
“That’s why Xi was worried about the admirals’ loyalty and their dedication. So we saw some internal crisis in the military because of the disagreement and even resistance against Xi’s aggressive policy in the Taiwan Strait,” he added.
China’s navy has been relatively unscathed by Xi’s purges of the military. That began to change late last year, however, when Vice Admiral Ju Xinchun was purged from China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, on suspicion of serious, unnamed crimes.
Li said that Xi made promises internally to the CCP that he would be the one to resolve what the regime considers to be the “Taiwan issue” and would “look for the opportunity to launch the new attack.”
If the Chinese fleet lacks sufficient capability to conquer Taiwan, however, Li believes that Xi could seize “those offshore islands like Jinmen [Kinmen] and Matsu” to demonstrate his resolve to the party and justify his third term in office.
Military strategists and China hands alike have feared such an attempt for years.
In 2021, the Center for a New American Security think tank published a report on the issue. In it, the authors said that the only way to prevent the CCP from devouring Taiwan’s outlying islands was to turn them into “poison frogs,” arming them to the teeth to ensure that they would bleed an invading force.
“This approach would make Chinese attempts to seize these islands so militarily, economically, and politically painful from the outset that the costs of coercion or aggression would be greater than the benefits,” the report reads.
Likewise, a new report published on Aug. 21 by the Institute for the Study of War think tank found that the CCP could quickly “erode Taiwan’s sovereignty over its outlying territory of Kinmen in a short-of-war coercion campaign.”
“U.S. unpreparedness or unwillingness to intervene amid domestic and international distractions increases the likelihood of this scenario,” the report reads.
The CCP is creating such a “domestic” crisis now, slowly building up its military and law enforcement apparatus and harassing Taiwanese vessels around Kinmen in a coercive campaign that is still far short of open war.
Paul Crespo, president of the Center for American Defense Studies think tank, said such activities are part of the CCP’s much larger strategy to extend its influence over Taiwan.
“These operations have a very focused intent, and we aren’t understanding it or responding well at all,” Crespo told The Epoch Times.
“Despite all the talk of a [naval] invasion of Taiwan, scenarios involving quarantine, coercion, and imposed law enforcement by China’s Coast Guard are far more likely. This is especially true against key outlying and vulnerable Taiwanese islands like Kinmen.”
Crespo, who previously served as a Marine officer and naval attache for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that the CCP could easily use the pretext of law enforcement to completely normalize the regime’s control of Taiwan’s waters around Kinmen and to pave the way for future CCP aggression.
“What do you do when China’s fishing fleet drops anchor 50 yards from the beach, and its Coast Guard goes in to ‘protect’ it?” he said.
The Gray Zone
Such “gray zone” tactics between lawful relations and outright war have become part and parcel of the CCP’s goal of dominating Taiwan in recent decades.
Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute think tank, said that Kinmen remains “extremely vulnerable to CCP aggression” due to its location and “would be nearly indefensible militarily.”
Still, Hsiao believes that the likelihood of outright military aggression against Kinmen is “not very high,” as the islands are economically integrated with the mainland and could, therefore, be more “receptive to Chinese influence” and gray zone tactics aimed at “political subversion.”
“Beijing would probably want to reinforce a positive example with these islands for the Taiwanese rather than take it by destructive military force,” Hsiao told The Epoch Times.
Instead, Hsiao suggests that the CCP could increase its influence operations and law enforcement activities to pull Kinmen into its direct influence.
Such a tactic would be nearly impossible for the United States to counter at present, as the United States does not formally recognize Taiwan as a country and does not support the island’s independence.
Hsiao added that Washington’s continued policy of not taking a position on Taiwan’s sovereignty make it progressively more difficult to counter China’s political and military coercion.
The CCP appears to have already taken action to propel this strategy forward.
In 2022, for example, Taiwanese authorities arrested eight current and former military members, including an army colonel stationed in Kinmen.
The colonel was charged with accepting bribes from the CCP in exchange for signing a document vowing to surrender the Kinmen Islands during a CCP attack or occupation.
Sam Kessler, a geopolitical analyst at the North Star Support Group risk advisory firm, said that such tactics were part of the regime’s “salami-slicing” tactics intended to use many seemingly small actions to secure a larger victory over Taiwan.
Because Kinmen has been on the “front lines of the various conflicts” between the CCP and Taiwan, Kessler told The Epoch Times, it was likely to be targeted through means of what the CCP calls the Three Warfares: “public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare.”
Such methods, he said, could help the CCP undermine confidence in Taiwan’s government and weaken local resistance to the idea of CCP control.
“Taiwan has taken various measures to try to prevent any attack using all domains of warfare. However, any cognitive and subversive action could still play a role in amplifying social and political divisions, too,” Kessler said.
Lessons From Ukraine
Stuck between the possibility of invasion and the certainty of harassment, the residents of Kinmen need new options to resist CCP aggression. Many experts are looking to Ukraine’s ongoing defense against Russia for inspiration.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, said that a key concern is Taiwan’s relative lack of capabilities to project power around Kinmen, given its distance from the main island.
“These islands have always been the most at risk of Taiwan’s holdings,” Clark told The Epoch Times.
In addition to Taiwan’s efforts to rotate more troops and ships to the islands, Clark said, its leaders could consider deploying small and even commercial-first drones, such as those that have proven so effective on both sides of the war in Ukraine.
“One opportunity is the use of unmanned systems,” Clark said. “They have a pretty low footprint.
“You could position some of these systems forward and be able to use them to pose enough of a threat to a Chinese seizure that it deters [an attack],” he added.
The goal, Clark said, is to project enough power on the islands to ensure that the CCP leadership knew it would “suffer some losses or be messy” to take Kinmen. It would not take much, he said, to make Kinmen too prickly a meal to digest.
“China would want this to be a smooth, bloodless victory,” he said. “If they end up having losses or destroyed equipment or having ships damaged, that undermines that.”
Another concern for Taiwan, as in Ukraine, is whether the United States has the will to support its partner against aggression.
Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center think tank, told The Epoch Times that the Chinese regime “could easily overwhelm” Kinmen and other outlying islands without added international support to make Taiwan’s defense “credible.”
Such support should include backing Taiwan with the full political force of the United States, he said.
“Relying on military means alone may not be sufficient to deter a CCP attack against these islands,” Fisher added.
Likewise, Grant Newsham, a senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, said that the decision to make a move on Kinmen militarily or politically depends on whether the CCP believes the United States has the will to contest it.
“Ultimately, going after the islands is a political decision for Beijing,” Newsham told The Epoch Times. “And they’ll be watching to see the state of affairs in the [United States] and whether America has the will to resist or respond.”
Newsham said the United States could demonstrate that will in myriad ways, including by expanding its navy, stationing troops in Taiwan, and taking steps to ensure that China could not participate economically in the dollar system should such an attack occur.
If all else failed and Kinmen fell, he said, it would be a signal to the world to take up arms.
“If Beijing moves to take one or more of the offshore islands, it will have tipped its hand and provoked … the free nations to speed up their own rearmament and military preparations.”
U.S. and Taiwanese officials have usually remained silent about the United States’s role in arming and training Taiwanese forces. Then-President Tsai Ing-wen became the first Taiwanese president in 40 years to acknowledge that U.S. troops were deployed in Taiwan in 2021.
Even so, U.S. policy has historically excluded Kinmen and Matsu from its commitments with Taiwan because of their exposure to the Chinese mainland. That appeared to change this year, however, when Taiwanese press reported that a small detachment of the U.S. Special Forces were operating on Kinmen.
Taiwan and the United States have not confirmed or denied the reporting or their overarching strategy for defending Kinmen.
The Epoch Times has requested comment from the National Security Council and the Pentagon.