HOW TO INVADE TAIWAN AND SUCCEED

Main languages used at home in Taiwan. The blue color designate Mandarin ('cmn') (source: Wikipédia)

What will you do about Taiwan, if you were Xi Jinping, the leader of China's communist party?

First of all, you will be Chinese, i.e. patient and good at calculations.

Then, you will be expedient, practical, intelligent, and bold, all good and very chinese qualities.

To successfully invade Taiwan and crush all opposition (including any eventual American intervention), you need to do many things in succession:

A) Prepare carefully, in the greatest secrecy.

B) If possible, cultivate relations and contacts in the province (that is already in the process of being done, by Mr Xi, who is presently courting the Kuomintang Nationalists - and their descendants - who came to the island in the wake of their defeat on the mainland).

C) Launch a first phase of operation against the external islands of the province, i.e. the two groups of islands that lies alongside the mainland, but also the Pescadores (Penghu) archipelago, in the Strait of Taiwan, and the island of Pratas, between the main island and the Spratlys. That action must be intense, quick, brutal and without pity. Ideally, everything must be over in a matter of hours or days. Taking all those islands will remove militarized obstacles between the mother-country and the lost province, and their possession will facilitate things, by helping to interdict the entrances of the Strait and the maritime approaches to that province.

D) At exactly the same time, all the runways (and, in fact, the whole air installations) on the island of Taiwan, both civilian airports and military airbases, plus radars, must be destroyed, for a very long time, with the help of the most powerful conventional missiles, the kind of  'Carrier-Killers' that the Americans are so afraid of. That action will accomplish two important things at once: 1) eliminate the threat of Taiwanese fighters, 2) eliminate the option of using those airports / bases/ radars for eventual attempts at aerial reinforcements coming from US military  bases in Japan, South Korea, or Guam, or all the way from America.

E) Very soon after, at most after a few days, the invasion as such must be started, with parachutists and gliders, but also troops coming from the mainland by ships. Again, the faster it is, the better. Overwhelming forces are to be used. Heavy losses are to be expected and accepted, in the view of gaining back a chunk of China's social body, and aldo putting that part of Chinese society inside the political umbrella that presently covers most of Chinese civilization. The only part of that civilization that will remain outside the People's Republic of China would then Singapore, inhabited by a population that is largely Chinese.

F) Losses ot ten soldiers to everyone of theirs would be acceptable in that regard. Taiwan was, is, and will remain part of China, no matter what.

G) The invasion force must cover all the western side of the island, with a main concentration in the north (where the capital of the province is) and a minor one in the south (where the second-biggest city is). What's in between those two forces would be crushed by the two pincers thus created.

H) Help must be sought from the Kuomintang Nationalists, and their descendants, who settled in the cities and in the central and eastern parts of the island. Their location can be explained by the fact that the 1.5 million persons who fled to the province at the end of the Civil War had to settled somewhere. All the usable land was used, so only the cities could welcome then, plus the poorest, less productive and more affordable land available, in the central and eastern parts of the island, on both side of the mountains that separate the island in two, from north to south. In practice, it means that only the highest part of the long and fertile plain that lies between the Strait and the mountains, on the western side of the island, could be settled by the newcomers, except in the north, around the capital.

I) The Kuomintang was our bitterest enemy at the time of the Chinese civil war, but they still share at least one thing with us: they believed deeply in the One China formula, contrary to the youngest folk living there.

J) Support must also be sought from the first inhabitants of Taiwan, i.e. all the membres of the Formosan tribes whose ancestors colonized the Malay cultural universe (Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.), then half of Madagascar, and both Micronesia and Polynesia (including the Hawaiians, the Maoris, plus the inhabitants of Easter Island, Tahiti, the Tonga archipelago, etc.). In Taiwan, they numbered around 300,000 persons, and they do not care that much about the Chinese majority living on the island. Red China of White China means little to them, and they can thus be talked to induce them to stand on our side.

K) The Americans will certainly try to intervene indirectly, by sending material and financial help to the present governement of the island. The destruction of the runways and the strenght of our maritime and air forces around Taiwan will certainly be a great impediment to those efforts, to say the least.

L) Should the Americans try to intervene directly with troops, they won't have any other choice than to used those present in Japan and South Korea, and those that can be airlifted quickly to those two countries. Then, if they try to bring them closer to the front, by ships or by air, they must be opposed to the utmost, with no regard to losses.

M) The conquest of the island will change the whole strategic structure, and the whole geopolitical situation. The first islands chain, along the eastern coast of Asia, will be broken, opening up the whole Pacific Ocean to our military forces, our trade, our influence, etc. Also, it would be a huge slap in the face of the U.S., a clear victory for our party and country, and a signal that things will never be the same, not to mention the return of the island population to its rightful place alongside us and the formation of a great smile on the mummified face of Mao Zedong, the great founder of this dynasty, still waiting for his final victory over the dreaded and hated Kuomintang.

N) Again, speed is of the essence in this whole thing. The return of Crimea to the fold proved that to the Russian Federation, and also to the rest of the world.

Post Scriptum 1

It must be said that the (probably inevitable) return of Taiwan on the side of the other Chinese provinces will introduce the virus of democracy even deeper in the flesh of Chinese society. Hong Kong (and, to a lesser extent, Macao) already gave China a taste of what democracy can do, growing from the ground up, instead of the other way, from top to bottom. Multiparties democracy is better than its communistic opposite, the One-Party version, in that the population may at least choose its masters and make them temporary ones.

Post Scriptum 2

Much has been said, especially from the trumpist Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo (''Swagger Mike'') about the Chinese Communist Party, that political animal that is more numerous than the whole population of Germany. Please note that he never mentioned that the party of the present ruler of India is twice the size of the CCP.

Post Scriptum 3

This whole article is, of course, fiction. At the very least, it is obviously the work of a Dreamer, one who (by the way) used to dream all his life about Québec's indépendance...I can only say this: the only difference between a dreamer and the normal part of Humankind (both the Mankind and the Womankind versions) is that the first one has to be way more patient...

Ainsi va la vie.