Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Governments worldwide are understandably focusing all of their energies on defeating the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigating the economic fallout from it. However, they must find additional bandwidth to deal with a fresh problem.

Adopting the policy of “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” China is trying to sneak through predatory acquisitions of key strategic assets and bribe governments into using Huawei Technologies equipment for their 5G networks.

In some ways Taiwan’s situation at the beginning of this year seems grim. Global economic disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic will disproportionately harm the nation because of its heavy dependence on exports. Chinese military activity near Taiwan, as well as verbal threats emanating from the Chinese government, have increased.

This has fueled speculation in Taiwan that Beijing has decided to politically incorporate Taiwan by military force and sees a window of opportunity while the US is temporarily preoccupied with the pandemic.