Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan: what will happen now between the United States and China?

A considerable increase in the military presence of China in the Strait of Taiwan and the use of hybrid warfare tactics against Taipei are the most possible consequences of the fleeting and controversial visit to Taiwan this Wednesday from the President of the United States Legislature, Nancy Pelosi.

“This crisis accelerates the perception that the risk of a conflict in the present decade is increasingly high. China knows that Taiwan is not only inalienable in its modernization process but that it is also the thrust with which it could put an end to the hegemony of EU in the region and in the world,” Xulio Ríos, director of the Observatory of the Chinese politics.

Less than 24 hours after visit Pelosithe Chinese Army began military exercises with live fire around the island that included the closure of the air spaces and maritime in several areas, something that Taipei described as a “blockade”.

Also, in the last week China imposed trade sanctions on hundreds of Taiwanese food products, including citrus fruits, various types of fish, and numerous processed foods.

IN TRAY

For the experts, Washington he has done nothing but serve on a platter Beijing the arguments for increasing military pressure on Taiwana territory on which China It claims sovereignty and which it considers a rebel province since the Kuomintang nationalists withdrew there in 1949 after losing the civil war against the communists.

“China can be expected to try to take advantage of the crisis in two ways: first, to encourage military and political measures that reinforce the sovereignty claimed over the island, which may include more committed actions by its Army by air and sea, affecting the airspace of Taiwan or the middle line of the Strait that have been respected until now,” said Ríos.

In fact, the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense today denounced a new incursion of Chinese aircraft into its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), of which the majority would have crossed the aforementioned median line.

HONG KONG AS SCREEN

The expert considers that China it could even “adopt legislative measures” such as a unification law, and even a specific timetable for it and pointed to what happened in Hong Kong in the last two years as “the script to take control of the situation”.

“If there (after the massive pro-democracy protests of 2019) there was not a repressive massacre, neither will there be in Taiwan disproportionate military actions. But it does have a qualitatively significant reaction,” he said.

One year after the protests of Hong Kong, Beijing imposed on the former British colony a National Security Law that in practice, as international organizations have denounced, has curtailed fundamental rights and freedoms there and put dozens of activists and journalists in jail.

“What for Pelosi is a symbolic action, from which those who may sympathize with the United States have distanced themselves in her party and in Taiwan itself, offers China the possibility of making another turn of the screw on the island, moving away the ghost of appearing weak and fine-tuning in the answer”, argues Ríos.

HYBRID WAR

Meanwhile, Shiany Pérez-Cheng, an analyst associated with the British think tank Resilient Futures, told Efe from Taipei that “the measures it is going to take China against Taiwan are not going to be conventional war -the case of Ukraine-, but rather a gray area with hybrid war tactics”.

This supposes, specified the also ex-teacher of the Spanish University of Salamanca“sanctions against exports, cyberattacks and further increasing pressure in the international arena including the increase in selective propaganda and influence operations and economic coercion of third parties” to continue trying to “suffocate Taiwan” by removing the support of other countries.

The sanctions, according to Pérez-Cheng, seek to “turn the Taiwanese against their government”, although he specified that the island already has experience dealing with this type of situation after those imposed on the export of pineapples to China last year, which has pushed Taiwan to diversify its market towards Japan, Australia and Europe.

In turn, Xulio Ríos highlights the economy as key so that in the Taiwanese local elections, next November, the electorate does not punish the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (PPD) for its “recklessness” in confronting the Beijing.

But the other side of the coin will be the ability to China to “win over Taiwanese public opinion” and that “the crisis does not lead to greater electoral support for the PDP.”

All this connects with Pérez-Cheng’s opinion that the island was “aware that the reprisals of China the vast majority will be against Taiwan” and therefore did not officially “hype” the possible visit of the American leader before she landed in Taipei.

“We are probably at the beginning of the fourth crisis in the Strait of Taiwan (after those of 1954, 58 and 95-97) and surely there will be diplomatic, economic, military and strategic consequences that will be delayed in time”, summarizes Xulio Ríos.

EFE