China's Military Advantage Over Taiwan Continues To Grow

Chinese Type 052 guided-missile destroyer Harbin, left, and Type-956EM destroyer Ningbo, right, during a China-Russia exercise off of Shanghai in 2014. AP  

Business Insider: New Pentagon charts lay out China's growing military advantage over Taiwan 

* China continued its rapid military modernization in 2021, increasing the size and quality of its armed forces. 

* That expansion comes amid heightened tensions with Taiwan, which Beijing vows to reabsorb, by force if necessary. 

* Taiwan is modernizing its military, but data compiled by the US Defense Department shows that China's advantage is only growing. 

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait intensified in 2021. China's military flights into Taiwan's air-defense identification zone more than doubled last year, and in the final days of December, Taipei and Beijing warned each other against crossing any red lines. 

Taiwan's Defense Ministry has said it is confident that it would be difficult for China to pull off a full-scale invasion, and the US Department of Defense's most recent report on China's military, released in November, says China "appears willing to defer the use of military force" against Taiwan, which it views as a breakaway province, as long as it thinks that unification can be negotiated and that the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits.  

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WNU Editor: A sobering analysis on the growing military gap between China and Taiwan.