Maybe a virus release could presage a sneak attack on Taiwan? By Gordon Chang.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a proof of concept that biological weapons work. …
It is clear the Communist Party lied about contagiousness — it told the world that the disease was not human-to-human transmissible when it knew it was highly so — and pressured other countries to take arrivals from China without restriction while locking down Chinese territory. Taken together, these two acts show that the Communist Party wanted COVID-19 to infect those beyond China’s borders. At last count, more than 6.5 million people outside China have been killed by a pathogen that should have been confined to that country. …
Taiwan?
So what would China’s first attack on Taiwan look like? Say, six months before an invasion China, violating the Biological Weapons Convention, could release a deadly pathogen on Taiwan.
China’s National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” Pathogens can now be designed to infect specific groups and even specific individuals. …
A regime monstrous enough to kill millions around the world is surely monstrous enough to release, as the first act in a conflict, a disease on the 23.9 million people of Taiwan. It could take the Pentagon months to realize that China had started a war to annex the island republic.
Some might say that, after an epidemic in Taiwan, Beijing would still have to mobilize forces and the world could then observe the effort. This observation would be true only if the People’s Liberation Army decided to wage a war with just conventional weapons.
Tactical nuclear strikes on Taiwan’s military installations and cities could allow China to take a depopulated island with a small, light, quick-to-mobilize force.
I suspect Chinese ruler Xi Jinping would not be overly upset if Taiwan were a smoking radioactive slab as long as it were part of the People’s Republic of China.
Why? The condition of a conquered Taiwan does not really matter to the Communist Party. It wants democratic Taiwan principally because the island republic represents a direct challenge to its core narrative that the Chinese people cannot govern themselves. Although most people in Taiwan do not self-identify as Chinese, their democracy, in the eyes of Communist Party leaders, is an existential threat to their rule.
The People’s Republic of China for decades has threatened nuclear strikes against Taiwan or countries coming to its assistance. In fact, Beijing has increased the frequency of such warnings since July of last year, when it proclaimed it would incinerate Japan. After that threat, it has promised destruction to all others coming to Taiwan’s aid. If Vladimir Putin uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and gets away with it — a distinct possibility — Xi Jinping might think he can also launch nukes.
Maybe.
