Taiwan Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter Gollevainen
- Start date
First time I heard the Japanese will be helping with the program. That sounds more reasonable. Even though I think the Japanese submarines are a bit too large for Taiwan. They would be better off with South Korean submarines.
Mr T
Senior Member
Well fair enough if you say you didn't know.
Taiwan is getting help but it's not openly declared by the companies in question in order to limit retaliation from China. For example, they're getting help from a team of "retired" engineers who have worked on submarine production from countries like Japan and will be doing the same work as if it was an official overseas licence build. I think Europeans and Americans are involved too.
The ROKN submarines currently in service are German designs instead of indigenous. I don't know whether the Taiwanese government asked Germany if it would supply a design like the Type 209 or 214, but given Berlin's foreign policy is very cautious it may well have said no. Something based off Japanese submarine designs is a fair alternative.
Long, winded article by Niall Ferguson on the looming Taiwan Crisis and its implications.
He argues that the upcoming Taiwan Crisis would be China's Cuban Missile Crisis, with America's role reversed. But he also suggest that the Taiwan Crisis would mark the end of American Empire, much like the Suez Crisis was the end British Empire, thus raising the stake for the US. To Ferguson, Taiwan is indefensible from a military standpoint, unless a nuclear war is involved. It should be noted that Ferguson wrote a biography of Henry Kissinger, so he has some familiarity of the history of Taiwan problem in Sino-US relationship, which is shown in the article by referring to Kissinger's dealing with China back in the '70s.
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By March 21, 2021, 5:00 PM EDT
In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinction from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
“There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to … a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” — the hedgehogs — “and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” — the foxes.
Berlin was talking about writers. But the same distinction can be drawn in the realm of great-power politics. Today, there are two superpowers in the world, the U.S. and China. The former is a fox. American foreign policy is, to borrow Berlin’s terms, “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels.” China, by contrast, is a hedgehog: it relates everything to “one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Fifty years ago this July, the arch-fox of American diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, flew to Beijing on a secret mission that would fundamentally alter the global balance of power. The strategic backdrop was the administration of Richard Nixon’s struggle to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War with its honor and credibility so far as possible intact.
The domestic context was dissension more profound and violent than anything we have seen in the past year. In March 1971, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of 22 murders in the My Lai massacre. In April, half a million people marched through Washington to protest against the war in Vietnam. In June, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Kissinger’s meetings with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, were perhaps the most momentous of his career. As a fox, the U.S. national security adviser had multiple objectives. The principal goal was to secure a public Chinese invitation for his boss, Nixon, to visit Beijing the following year.
But Kissinger was also seeking Chinese help in getting America out of Vietnam, as well as hoping to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in a way that would put pressure on the Soviet Union, America’s principal Cold War adversary, to slow down the nuclear arms race. In his opening remarks, Kissinger listed no fewer than six issues for discussion, including the raging conflict in South Asia that would culminate in the independence of Bangladesh.
Zhou’s response was that of a hedgehog. He had just one issue: Taiwan. “If this crucial question is not solved,” he told Kissinger at the outset, “then the whole question [of U.S.-China relations] will be difficult to resolve.”
To an extent that is striking to the modern-day reader of the of this and the subsequent meetings, Zhou’s principal goal was to persuade Kissinger to agree to “recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government in China” and “Taiwan Province” as “an inalienable part of Chinese territory which must be restored to the motherland,” from which the U.S. must “withdraw all its armed forces and dismantle all its military installations.” (Since the Communists’ triumph in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the island of Taiwan had been the last outpost of the nationalist Kuomintang. And since the Korean War, the U.S. had defended its autonomy.)
With his eyes on so many prizes, Kissinger was prepared to make the key concessions the Chinese sought. “We are not advocating a ‘two China’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution,” he told Zhou. “As a student of history,” he went on, “one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which [the] Prime Minister … indicated to me.” Moreover, “We can settle the major part of the military question within this term of the president if the war in Southeast Asia [i.e. Vietnam] is ended.”
Asked by Zhou for his view of the Taiwanese independence movement, Kissinger dismissed it out of hand. No matter what other issues Kissinger raised — Vietnam, Korea, the Soviets — Zhou steered the conversation back to Taiwan, “the only question between us two.” Would the U.S. recognize the People’s Republic as the sole government of China and normalize diplomatic relations? Yes, after the 1972 election. Would Taiwan be expelled from the United Nations and its seat on the Security Council given to Beijing? Again, yes.
....
[Read rest of the article following the link at the top]
He argues that the upcoming Taiwan Crisis would be China's Cuban Missile Crisis, with America's role reversed. But he also suggest that the Taiwan Crisis would mark the end of American Empire, much like the Suez Crisis was the end British Empire, thus raising the stake for the US. To Ferguson, Taiwan is indefensible from a military standpoint, unless a nuclear war is involved. It should be noted that Ferguson wrote a biography of Henry Kissinger, so he has some familiarity of the history of Taiwan problem in Sino-US relationship, which is shown in the article by referring to Kissinger's dealing with China back in the '70s.
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America is a diplomatic fox, while Beijing is a hedgehog fixated on the big idea of reunification.
By March 21, 2021, 5:00 PM EDT
In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinction from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
“There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to … a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” — the hedgehogs — “and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” — the foxes.
Berlin was talking about writers. But the same distinction can be drawn in the realm of great-power politics. Today, there are two superpowers in the world, the U.S. and China. The former is a fox. American foreign policy is, to borrow Berlin’s terms, “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels.” China, by contrast, is a hedgehog: it relates everything to “one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Fifty years ago this July, the arch-fox of American diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, flew to Beijing on a secret mission that would fundamentally alter the global balance of power. The strategic backdrop was the administration of Richard Nixon’s struggle to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War with its honor and credibility so far as possible intact.
The domestic context was dissension more profound and violent than anything we have seen in the past year. In March 1971, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of 22 murders in the My Lai massacre. In April, half a million people marched through Washington to protest against the war in Vietnam. In June, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Kissinger’s meetings with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, were perhaps the most momentous of his career. As a fox, the U.S. national security adviser had multiple objectives. The principal goal was to secure a public Chinese invitation for his boss, Nixon, to visit Beijing the following year.
But Kissinger was also seeking Chinese help in getting America out of Vietnam, as well as hoping to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in a way that would put pressure on the Soviet Union, America’s principal Cold War adversary, to slow down the nuclear arms race. In his opening remarks, Kissinger listed no fewer than six issues for discussion, including the raging conflict in South Asia that would culminate in the independence of Bangladesh.
Zhou’s response was that of a hedgehog. He had just one issue: Taiwan. “If this crucial question is not solved,” he told Kissinger at the outset, “then the whole question [of U.S.-China relations] will be difficult to resolve.”
To an extent that is striking to the modern-day reader of the of this and the subsequent meetings, Zhou’s principal goal was to persuade Kissinger to agree to “recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government in China” and “Taiwan Province” as “an inalienable part of Chinese territory which must be restored to the motherland,” from which the U.S. must “withdraw all its armed forces and dismantle all its military installations.” (Since the Communists’ triumph in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the island of Taiwan had been the last outpost of the nationalist Kuomintang. And since the Korean War, the U.S. had defended its autonomy.)
With his eyes on so many prizes, Kissinger was prepared to make the key concessions the Chinese sought. “We are not advocating a ‘two China’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution,” he told Zhou. “As a student of history,” he went on, “one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which [the] Prime Minister … indicated to me.” Moreover, “We can settle the major part of the military question within this term of the president if the war in Southeast Asia [i.e. Vietnam] is ended.”
Asked by Zhou for his view of the Taiwanese independence movement, Kissinger dismissed it out of hand. No matter what other issues Kissinger raised — Vietnam, Korea, the Soviets — Zhou steered the conversation back to Taiwan, “the only question between us two.” Would the U.S. recognize the People’s Republic as the sole government of China and normalize diplomatic relations? Yes, after the 1972 election. Would Taiwan be expelled from the United Nations and its seat on the Security Council given to Beijing? Again, yes.
....
[Read rest of the article following the link at the top]
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
That's a good article. Taiwan is indeed so important to China that it is the driving force of much of China's development. Thinking about this now, if the US made it clear that it would not intervene and China took over the ROC by whatever means 2 or 3 decades ago, China would never have modernized into the military beast it is today; it wouldn't have the reason to. The spark that set ablaze what is now the fastest developing military program in the world was America's sailing through the Taiwan Strait in an act of intimidation against China. The worst thing to do to a rival with massive potential is to hold something inconsequential yet dear and emotional to him as a constant taunting point because it will drive him to realize his potential. The best course of action is to feed him like a baby to keep him soft and wanting for nothing. When China reunites Taiwan, there could be some loss of drive to continue modernizing so I hope when that happens, China's already got the lead and momentum to a point where a brisk jog (at a giant's pace of course) is enough to maintain it.
Also, I did not realize that Trump had some down-to-earth intellect and logic beneath that veil of third grade speech pattern and fake words. I think this excerpt is quite interesting:
"According to former National Security Adviser ’s memoir, the president liked to point to the tip of one of his Sharpies and say, “This is Taiwan,” then point to the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and say, “This is China.” “Taiwan is like two feet from China,” Trump one Republican senator. “We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it.”
Unlike others in his national security team, Trump cared little about human rights issues. On Hong Kong, he said: “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights problems too.”"
Why are they still flying these antiques? If F-CK-1 is largely based on what was meant to be the F-5's successor (F-20 Tigershark), then in it should be able to handle these missions.
Is there a huge discrepancy is $/flight hour? Only thing I can think of.
This article is a hit and miss, some good insights, but elsewhere Fergi just parrots the mainstream press like regarding China hitting Aust over Covid19 origins, the truth is, in addition to Aust's misinformation about Covid19, there was also a long list of anti-Chinese discrimination - from Chinese companies to individuals.
Also TW is far from prosperous as he claims, the province has been in economic stagnation since Tsai came into office.
Also, everything and anything is politicalized by both the KMT and DPP in endless circles of democrazy mob fights....proving that election-based democracy is a MASSIVE failure in this province.