Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Although former premier Tang Fei (唐飛) said on Aug. 17 that Taiwan’s indigenous Hsiung Feng III anti-ship missile would be like a mosquito’s bite on an elephant, a new report by a US think tank argues that Taiwan must have “some means of hitting back against Chinese military targets.”

“The ability to hit back at Chinese military targets may not have profound operational effects, but when an inferior force takes on a superior one, the ability to strike back has a nontrivial strategic and psychological impact on an attacker,” said the 38-page Asian Alliances in the 21st Century report, released on Tuesday by the Washington-based think tank Project 2049 Institute.

Military watchers in recent years have made much of the rapid modernization of China’s military, focusing primarily on the introduction of new platforms, such as the J-20 stealth fighter and the refurbished Varyag aircraft carrier, or advances in missile technology, such as the Dong Feng-21D “carrier killer.” To a large extent, this is also what the US Department of Defense’s latest report on the Chinese military released last week zeroed in on.

However, since 1995, tens of thousands of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been working on a project that, to date, has attracted surprisingly little attention. That this is the case befuddles the mind, as this endeavor, first revealed in a 2008 CCTV documentary and confirmed by the PLA’s China Defense Daily in December 2009, has the potential to alter the strategic balance in the Pacific. Stunningly, the new Pentagon report only makes one brief mention of that development.