Taiwan in the crosshairs, Xi pauses on India

A pause does not mean Xi Jinping has abandoned his impossible goal of occupying more territory at India's expense.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar know that Xi Jinping only pressed the Pause button and not the Stop button to take aggressive action against India. Despite the disengagement agreement finally concluded between the two parties after the Doklam incident. PLA soldiers marched into Bhutanese territory in June 2017 to provide cover for a team building a road across it. Such a decision would have seriously compromised Indian security, in addition to violating Bhutan's sovereign rights. This is why Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent troops to Doklam and stopped Chinese road-building efforts. After that, there was the Galwan clash between units of the PLA and the Indian Army, which began in May 2020. At the cost of twenty precious lives of our jawans, and several times that number of the on the Chinese side, the effort to forcibly occupy Indian territory was brought to naught. abandoned by the PLA. However, clashes also took place in 2021 and 2022. While the Chinese side was building roads and creating military infrastructure on the side of the Line of Actual Control (LoAC) it occupied, Beijing opposed the road network , tunnels and bridges that were under construction on the Indian side since Prime Minister Modi. came to power in 2014. They were not used to such assertiveness from the Indian side and from then on they considered Prime Minister Modi as an obstacle to their plans to occupy Arunachal Pradesh and parts of other Indian states.

The year 2023 saw a pause in these operations, as has so far the year 2024. An important factor has been the determination of the Indian side to resist any attempt at encroachment on the national territory. Such a pause does not mean that CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping has abandoned his reckless plan to occupy more territory at the expense of India, but that in the period 2021-2023, Xi Jinping has seen his personal popularity plummeting in the People's Republic of China. . His confidants, most of whom favor military rather than diplomatic solutions to territorial disputes, have recommended that he work toward de facto control of Taiwan by 2027. Such an achievement would, in their view, guarantee both a fourth mandate and a place in history. with Mao. The justifications for claiming that Taiwan is part of China have been concocted by the Chinese side since the CCP came to power in 1949, and have no basis in history. If India had followed China's path under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but avoided fabricating history, including through fake maps, vast tracts of land crossing the western and eastern borders of the India could have been claimed by India, as in the past the princes of India came to these lands and ruled them, thereby facilitating the migration of not only Indian culture but also Indians to such places. Many of these settlers intermarried with the local population, which is why several million people in these lands have a bit of India in their DNA, in addition to magnificent monuments built by the local population who were ruled by princes Indians. In Tibet, India has long had significant rights, as Indians and Tibetans have much in common in culture and history, much more than Tibetans ever had with China, which has occupied the country since 1950, cutting off most of Tibet into separate zones. provinces in which large numbers of people from southern China were settled. To this day, elements of the population of the provinces carved out of Tibet in the 1950s share several characteristics with the Indian population. One example is the Naxi people of Yunnan, who are matriarchal in the manner of parts of the population of South and Northeast India.
After fiascos such as the Zero Covid 2022 effort and the economic damage caused by democracies' reaction to the PRC's efforts to gut their industry and absorb it, left Xi unpopular and vulnerable to mass civil unrest . Those close to him say that only a military victory would restore Xi's popularity. Aware that a large-scale military incursion into India could prove a disaster since Prime Minister Modi became prime minister and showed courage at Doklam, Xi appears to have shifted his focus to Taiwan. The small but prosperous country, famous for its technological prowess, is now the target of psychological operations and kinetic encirclement intended to weaken the resolve of the island's 26 million residents to resist PRC control and make another Hong Kong, an entirely Chinese city in all. but the name. The name Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region has become an object of ridicule because there is no autonomy in Hong Kong. Since the 1990s, Beijing has sought to make Shanghai and other PRC cities effective competitors of Hong Kong for foreign investment, and has succeeded. In 2019, Hong Kong was emptied of all administrative freedom, and any Hong Kong citizen who dares to seek to restore their past status faces a long period of imprisonment. As a result of such repression, even those in Taiwan who favored absorption by the PRC under the “One country, two systems” model used in Hong Kong in 1997 opposed such ties. At the same time, under President Tsai Ing-wen and now under President Lai Ching-te, Taiwanese preparedness to ward off such aggression is growing stronger. Although Xi warned that a vote for Lai in the last Taiwanese election would mean war with China, more than 40% of voters put aside their fear and voted for him and vice-presidential candidate Bikhim Hsiao. As a result, Xi must devote more and more attention and effort to his drive to wipe out the freedom of the Taiwanese people. Hence the Pause button on India. If Taiwan falls, India will soon become the next target, as will Japan and the US military presence in much of the Pacific waters. This is why the United States and Japan joined Australia to form the Quad with India. As the leaders of all target countries know very well, Taiwan is a frontline state in the defense of the Indo-Pacific. This is why helping to guarantee its freedom is crucial for the security of the Indo-Pacific rim.