Tipping the Scale: PRC's Military Modernization and Cross-Taiwan Straits Relations

As long as China considers Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory, China will always be the primary security threat to Taiwan. The modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) over the last two decades is certainly a threat to Taiwan’s security. Yet, cross-Straits relation since 2008 has been relatively peaceful and less confrontational. In this article, I suggest that while Taiwan’s military establishment has warned of the dangers and threats of China’s increasingly modernized military capabilities, the dynamics of the Taiwanese domestic politics as well as the burgeoning economic and trade ties between China and Taiwan have jointly served to shift Taiwan’s focus from the military to the political and economic aspect of its security. Resulting from this shift away from the military dimension of cross-Straits relation, then, China–Taiwan relationship while contentious has been decidedly less confrontational and more predictable