“These years, China is showing stronger and stronger reaction to US-Taiwan arms sales, and that (has) turned your country more wary with arms sales,” Andrew Yang, the deputy defense minister, told an annual US-Taiwan defense industry conference running through Tuesday in Virginia.
The Obama administration informally told US lawmakers late on Friday that it would upgrade Taiwan’s existing 140-plus F-16 A/B jets while holding off on a request for the relatively advanced F-16 C/Ds, the latest model.
Yang said Taiwan’s top military hardware needs were the new fighters plus diesel electric submarines — transfers that Beijing appears to oppose above all other arms supplies to Taiwan to date.
The new planes would replace antiquated F-5s “to maintain air superiority across the Taiwan Strait in the near future,” he said in prepared comments distributed to reporters outside the closed-door event.
They would offer “irreplaceable deterrence capabilities” as part of a modernized force to defend Taiwan, deter conflicts and bolster regional security, Yang said.
All US arms sales to Taiwan are strongly opposed by China, which claims the self-ruled island as its own. Beijing has declined to renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan into its fold despite steady progress in cross-Straits relations.
For the first time, no one from the US State Department is addressing the US-Taiwan defense industry session, the 10th in a series hosted by a business group promoting advanced arms sales to the island.
The Pentagon will be represented by an acting assistant secretary of defense, Peter Lavoy. However, “his keynote speech will not be released to the press” at the Defense Department’s insistence, said the US-Taiwan Business Council, which organized the forum that began Sunday.
The F-16 issue underlines the key role of US arms makers and their political backers in the sensitive interplay between the world’s two largest economies over Taiwan, the thorniest issue dividing them.
To complicate matters for Obama, the US action on F-16s is playing into a presidential election due in Taiwan in January. The opposition Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, is mounting a strong challenge to President Ma Ying-jeou and his ruling Nationalists, or Koumintang party.
Only days before the Richmond conference, an unidentified senior US official was cited by the Financial Times newspaper as criticizing Tsai’s China policy as jeopardizing regional stability.
Dan Blumenthal, a former Pentagon China desk chief now at the American Enterprise Institute, said the reported anonymous criticism of Tsai appeared to be an Obama administration gift to Beijing designed to head off any serious “blowback” over the F-16 upgrades.
Obama’s authorization of a sale of $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan in January 2010 prompted China to suspend military-to-military ties and to threaten sanctions against US firms.
