The crisis unleashed after the visit this week by the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan has taken just a few hours to lead to a volatile and dangerous economic-military situation in which the actors involved are no longer only the Beijing regime and the independent island de facto, but the US and strategic sectors of the world economy. Aggressive Chinese military activities around Taiwan have been joined by a worrying escalation of punitive economic measures.
The communist regime announced on Friday the suspension sine die of military meetings at the highest level with the US and the freezing of cooperation on issues such as environmental protection, the fight against drug trafficking, international crimes, the repatriation of irregular immigrants and judicial assistance. He also advanced economic sanctions against Pelosi and his relatives. Joe Biden, who did not agree with Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, is thus drawn into a major strategic conflict that confirms his fears that Beijing would use the presence of Democratic politics on the island as an excuse to display its reunifying purpose.
But it is on the military front where all the alarms are going off. In just hours, China launched unprecedented live-fire naval exercises. Ship traffic has not been officially interrupted in a crucial area for the global supply chain, but the reality is that it has been reduced and is an obvious cause of destabilization of the routes. Chinese warships had fired at least 11 ballistic missiles as of yesterday, four of which flew over Taiwan’s capital Taipei in a reckless and disproportionate show of force. In addition, five of the projectiles launched hit Japan’s exclusive maritime economic zone. Both Chinese planes and warships have crossed the limit de facto with Taiwan, generating situations where any incident can have unpredictable consequences.
The crisis threatens to hit the already limping world economy hard. The warning from Mark Liu, president of TSMC, the world’s largest processor manufacturer, about the possibility that it will be forced to suspend production if the situation worsens, leaves a far from remote uncertainty in the air. The Taiwanese company is the engine of the integrated circuit industry, controls 54% of the world market and needs access to raw materials, components of hardware and engineering tools to be able to produce. The paralysis of it would mean a chain brake of innumerable companies throughout the planet.
The arrogance exhibited by Xi Jinping does not seem destined at the moment to invade Taiwan but to show emphatically that his aspirations for the island remain intact. We could be facing the first trial of the future harassment method: rather economic strangulation than military invasion, technically very difficult. The risky support that Pelosi conveyed for Taiwan independence has become a source of concern for the island, but the Chinese military deployment shows a disproportion close to that of the bully neighbor and insensitive to the risk of a military conflagration that neither China nor the United States neither the rest of the world want.
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