China could seize Taiwan’s smaller outlying islands as a tactic to intimidate the government in Taipei, a US intelligence report has warned.
Though the vast majority of its population lives on the main island of Taiwan, Taipei also controls a number of smaller island chains including the Kinmen and Matsu close to the Chinese mainland, the Pratas and Taiping in the South China Sea and the Penghu archipelago off Taiwan’s southeastern coast.
Seizing and attempting to annex these islands is among a number of military options available to Beijing as it continues to threaten Taiwan with a wholesale invasion, according to the latest Worldwide Threat Assessment report released earlier this month by the US Defence Intelligence Agency.
Beijing claims Taiwan as a breakaway province, and Chinese president Xi Jinping has threatened to “reunite” the island with the mainland, by force if necessary. The Taiwanese people largely favour the status quo which gives them de facto independence.
Kinmen, at its closest point, is less than two km (1.2 miles) away from Chinese-controlled territory.
The DIA’s report does not anticipate an all-out invasion of Taiwan in 2025, but warns China’s People Liberation Army (PLA) forces could scale up the attacks on the democratic island’s smaller outposts.
“China possesses a variety of military options to coerce Taiwan, including increasing the frequency and scope of China’s military presence operations, air and maritime blockades, seizure of Taiwan’s smaller outlying islands, joint firepower strikes, and a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan,” the US agency said.
It added: “China appears willing to defer seizing Taiwan by force as long as it calculates unification ultimately can be negotiated, the costs of forcing unification continue to outweigh the benefits, and its stated redlines have not been crossed by Taiwan or its partners and allies.”
The US intelligence report also warned that Beijing will continue terrorising Taiwan with its “campaign of diplomatic, information, military and economic pressure” to achieve its long-term goal of “reunification”.
China will also test the US’s commitment to Taiwan’s defence, the defence agency said. Though Taiwan and the US have no formal military treaties or even diplomatic ties, Washington would be expected to respond to any Chinese attack against Taiwan and use Guam as a staging point for such operations.
War monitors have warned that the archipelagos of Kinmen and Matsu are especially vulnerable among Taiwan’s territories.
Across the Taiwan Strait, Kinmen and Matsu islands are located over 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan but just off the PRC’s coast.
“Beijing’s contemporary efforts to annex Kinmen and Matsu blend economic enticements, nonviolent coercion, legal warfare, information operations, infrastructure construction, and miscellaneous ‘gray zone’ lines of effort to manipulate public opinion on the islands and erode Taiwan’s control of its territories,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its assessment last year.
The US-based think tank warned that China could “escalate current lines of effort (LOEs) to erode Taiwan’s sovereignty over its outlying territory of Kinmen in a short-of-war coercion campaign to seize control of the island group in the near term.”
Taiwan is this week hosting the governor of Guam, the US Pacific territory that would almost certainly be a key player in any Chinese military moves against Taiwan.
Guam governor Lourdes A Leon Guerrero is making her first trip to Taiwan since taking office in 2019.
Since then, China has significantly upped its military pressure on Taiwan with drills around the island and incursions by ships and aircraft across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, especially in the past two years.
