Although the president did not mention it in his speech to the Communist Party Congress, the order is mentioned in his report along with the nuclear deterrent.
Though he didn’t say so on Sunday at the opening of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has ordered the military to “modernize quickly” to “win regional wars”. This phrase was not heard in his address to the nearly 2,300 deputies gathered in the Great Hall of the People, but it is included in the report presented by Xi to Congress. Subsequent dissemination revealed that he shortened the speech, which spans 72 pages in Mandarin and 63 in English, and skipped some key parts.
Of all, this is one of the most notable: “We will become more adept at deploying our forces regularly and in different ways, and our military will be determined and flexible in conducting its operations. This will enable us to shape our security posture, defuse and manage crises and conflicts, and win regional wars.”
The omission is significant at a time of heightened tension with Taiwan, the ‘de facto’ democratic and independent island claimed by Beijing since the end of the civil war in 1949. The call for reunification came just later in his speech, when Xi went through the peaceful path of the “one country, two systems” model, but did not renounce “the use of force” against “the interference of external forces and the few separatists pursuing Taiwan’s independence”.
Swords have been raised in the strait separating this island from the mainland since the summer, when US House of Representatives President Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan ignoring threats from Beijing. After his visit, the Chinese army surrounded the island with its biggest military maneuvers to date, even firing rockets across the airspace from side to side. In addition to attempting to intimidate the Taiwanese, the exercises were a rehearsal for the blockade that would begin a hypothetical invasion.
Admiral Michael Gilday, head of US naval operations, warned of that possibility on Wednesday, believing Beijing could attempt to take the island not in 2025, as the Taiwan Ministry of Defense fears, but next year or even this. year. This is what Gilday – who is recommending an action plan to the Pentagon – suspects after listening to Xi at the conclave, where he promised that “the full reunification of our country can and must be achieved and will be achieved without a doubt.”
In addition to the threat to Taiwan, the allusion to “winning regional wars” is worrisome given the tensions on the border between China and all its neighbors. From the claim to Japan of the Senkaku Islands to the disputes in the South Seas, to the clashes with India in the Himalayas, Beijing maintains several open fronts that exacerbate the instability of the troubled international scene.
Actually, this order to “win regional wars” is not new, as Xi already mentioned it when he was appointed party secretary general when he inspected a garrison in Guangdong province in 2012. Both in the previous Congress, in 2017, and in the 2019 Defense White Paper urged the military to “win wars”, without specifying their location.
To all this is added something that he did say in his speech, which suggests that his nuclear power has been boosted. “We will establish a strong strategic deterrent system and increase the proportion of armed forces with new combat capabilities,” Xi promised. According to experts, such “strategic deterrence” alludes to nuclear weapons and, coincidentally or not, his speech took place on the same day as the 58th anniversary of the first atomic bomb in China.
As China’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu repeated the propaganda slogan of the “human community with a shared future for the new era” this Thursday, diplomacy of the “warrior wolves” went from howl to fists. The XX Congress of the Communist Party, with which Beijing wants to project its rise to the world, coincided with a fight outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester in which several employees took part, including the consul, Zheng Xiyuan.
On Sunday, protesters in Hong Kong put up banners outside the diplomatic office, including a caricature of Xi Jinping as a naked king looking in a mirror. The employees tried to remove them and got into an argument with the activists, dragging one of them inside to beat him up. He was eventually rescued by the police, but a video shows Consul Zheng pulling his hair. An aggression he admitted in a television interview on Thursday that has sparked a conflict with the United Kingdom.
In recent years, China’s soft diplomacy has become more aggressive with a new generation of “warrior wolves” in the foreign ministry and embassies. Now they go from howling to fists.
Source: La Verdad
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