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Equally worrying is this, how China's relentless Taiwan drills illustrate invasion plan
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Things don't get better, do they? Charles Parton joins me, expert in Chinese politics, former diplomat and distinguished fellow at the Think Tank Council on Geostrategy
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Charles, thank you very much indeed for joining me. The Chinese are upping their drills in the Taiwan Straits. What's going on
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Well, first of all, you know, the worry, are they going to invade by 2027
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which is when the People's Liberation Army has been charged by Xi Jinping to be ready to carry out an invasion
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But I don't think for a moment that they're going to carry out an invasion in 2027, or indeed, I suspect, in the decade afterwards, for reasons that we could go into
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But what it is doing is making Taiwan, putting pressure on Taiwan in a whole range of ways
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including by showing that it could or maybe it tends to trying to wear down their will to resist by some of these military means They also been investing heavily in their shipbuilding industry They also are investing in defence more broadly
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They're equipping themselves for a potential takeover of Taiwan, aren't they? I mean, it's pretty obvious
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Yes, but I don't think it's going to be a military takeover. I mean, that will be part of the means of breaking the will of the Taiwanese people
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But although I can conceive that they might, for instance, seize some islands which belong to Taiwan and have an airfield which are quite a long way
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hundreds of miles from Taiwan, to make a small point. But the moment they invade is the moment
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that the global economy really collapses. I mean, President Trump has done quite a lot to do that
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but an invasion of Taiwan would really do that. There would be massive unemployment globally
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but also in China, and that would lead to considerable unrest in China because there's
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no real social security net there. And that unrest will be directed against the Chinese Communist
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Party, because all good things come from the Chinese Communist Party. But the obverse of that
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coin is that all bad things are blamed on the Communist Party So that a real stability issue And I really don think that Xi Jinping and the Chinese are going to take that risk certainly in the foreseeable future Beyond 10 years I can tell
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There was a study this week by the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank
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that suggested that China's military assertiveness over Taiwan was deliberately ambiguous to create uncertainty over its final intentions
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It's always maintained the strategic ambiguity point. And it said that this grey zone strategy combines a variety of threats
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from military exercises to cyber attacks and the simple use of financial power to win backing
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from other countries. In a world where Donald Trump is imposing tariffs, including on Taiwan
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does that not simply make the embrace of the Chinese potentially more attractive
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Well, I think for sure it does. If your main ally has, should we say, screwed you over
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then you're going to be more sympathetic to other people and look for other ways of earning money
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which includes deepening economic ties. And when you deepen economic ties inevitably you deepen political ties So I think it is extremely worrying what the Americans are doing What we don know is of course whether they would
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if there was an attack on Taiwan or a serious blockade or even quarantining it so that any ships going to Taiwan
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must seek Chinese permission, what the American reaction would be. They've kept that ambiguous
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But if the Chinese ever thought that the Americans, or they came to some form of grand agreement with the Americans
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that actually we don't care about Taiwan, then, of course, the odds on invasion go up
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But I honestly don't see the Americans at this stage going for that
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I mean, that would prejudice their whole position in the Western Pacific and that would have very severe consequences
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But who knows with Trump? No one knows really what comes out of Trump next. Well, we don't. That's absolutely true
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And we also know that we're living in an age of strongman politics with spheres of influence and the balance of power back in vogue
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Charles, thank you very much. That was Charles Parton there, expert in Chinese politics, former diplomat and distinguished fellow at the Council on Geostrategy