【英文】布鲁金斯学会报告：中国能拿下台湾吗？为什么没有人真正知道（44页）

英文研究报告 2022年08月23日 09:01 管理员

Beijing considers Taiwan an integral part of Chinese territory that must be reunified with the mainland.2 The United States views the island polity of 23 million people as an impressive democracy, a high-tech industrial power, and a good friend, even if not a country or a formal ally. The previous commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command thinks China may try to settle the issue with force, perhaps even within the next five years or so.3 This is certainly a credible statement, as tensions are clearly high. Various incidents involving close approaches between Chinese and Taiwan military forces rose by 30 to 100% or more from 2019 to 2020, demonstrating the increasing acuteness of the situation.4 And the trend continues; for example, in 2021, China conducted a record number of military aircraft sorties into Taiwan’s self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone.But can China conquer Taiwan? Throughout the Cold War, and for some time after, the answer was a clear no. Despite China’s proximity to Taiwan, U.S. dominance in advanced air and naval weaponry during that time meant that it almost surely would have defended Taiwan successfully. But today, the answer is less clear. Because of China’s recent and dramatic military modernizations, the situation is now much more complex.

Many Americans still seem to think that the United States could prevail in defending its faraway friend. For example, most arguments in favor of retaining “strategic ambiguity” — basing any possible American military response to a crisis on Washington’s determination of who and what caused the crisis — presume that whatever America’s declaratory policy is, Washington will be able to back it up with military power.6 By contrast, Chinese thinkers seem increasingly confident that the U.S.-China military balance is shifting in their favor. In the last half decade, Chinese grand strategists appear to have settled on a more ambitious and expansive vision for the nation — to broaden its influence not only in the western Pacific but also well beyond. By this logic, establishing superiority over the United States in waters near Taiwan is perhaps a necessary first step en route to regional primacy. Chinese President Xi also appears to be on a mission to reunify Taiwan with China on his watch, and to do so sooner rather than later. Like the architects of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan leading up to World War I, or the planners leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Chinese military leaders seem to be gaining confidence in their ability to achieve precise battlefield effects quickly. As the Pentagon’s latest annual report on China’s military puts it.