Part 1: Taiwan’s Defense Strategy – why there are reasons to worry

Taiwan Trilogy 2023 With the Russian invasion of Ukraine a lot of international attention has been shifting to Taiwan – will China eventually attack the island? The Communist Party of China has been vowing to take over Taiwan since 1949. For a long time this promise sounded rather hollow, as the People’s Liberation Army did not have the capacity for such a daunting venture, but with the massive upgrading of the Chinese military such a move could be more and more likely. As the China Taiwan conflict is so crucial to the Indo-Pacific arena and to world peace at large we decided to dedicate a three part series to it. We will talk with Taiwanese experts about how an attack on Taiwan could look like. What Taiwan could do to defend itself and why it disagrees on this question with US military experts. We will discuss how China uses psychological and information warfare to influence public opinion and the political decision making process in Taiwan. And how Taiwanese civil society and the government try to enhance the resilience of their democracy. In our first part we talk to the journalist and military expert Paul Huang, who is currently Research Fellow at Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation.  This episode's sound editor is Yu Ge.