Taiwan Presidential Hopeful Links China’s Military Drills to Intimidation

The presidential candidate for Taiwan’s ruling party on Tuesday implied military drills conducted by China this week constituted interference in the island’s democracy.

The two days of exercises concluded Tuesday, just four days ahead of Taiwan’s elections.

It is unclear whether the drills, held in waters just off the coast of China’s eastern Zhejiang Province, were scheduled with Taiwan in mind. However, they came at a time of heightened sensitivity on the self-ruled island, which remembers Chinese displays of force aimed at intimidating voters in the not-so-distance past.

China’s Maritime Safety Administration on Sunday issued a “navigation warning” saying the country would be conducting live-fire training in areas of the East China Sea Monday to Tuesday.

Taiwan Vice President and presidential candidate Lai Ching-te, was asked about China’s East China Sea drills during a pre-election press conference hosted by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Tuesday.

Lai pointed out that China has involved itself in every election since Taiwan democratized but called interference this year the “most serious” yet in terms of fake and political warfare.

“It’s a total mess,” he said. “China has obviously used war and peace to try to influence this election to build a pro-China regime in Taiwan.”

However, he said he believed the Taiwanese public is wise to China’s efforts to influence the electoral contests, which he said they would resist with “their sacred vote.”

The Maritime Safety Administration didn’t immediately respond to Newsweek‘s request for comment.

Taiwanese democracy would be destroyed if China succeeds in annexing Taiwan—which it has threatened to do through force if need be—Lai said.

In such a scenario, Taiwanese would no longer be electing a president but a leader subservient to Beijing, such as in Hong Kong.

Recent polling shows 85 percent of Taiwanese reject the “one country, two systems” framework of Hong Kong that Beijing has also proposed for Taiwan.

Chinese military flexing, including its near-daily incursions into Taiwan’s declared air defense identification zone, has diminished overall in the weeks leading up to the election.

China watchers have attributed this to the lessons the country learned from past elections, where intimidation tactics backfired and engendered a rally round the flag effect among Taiwanese voters.

“China has definitely scaled back its activity around Taiwan in the last 1.5 months. I think it’s likely that they will continue to do so. Historically, intimidation efforts have had the opposite effect that Beijing wanted them to have,” independent defense analyst Ben Lewis wrote on social media in December.

Regardless of the intent behind his week’s exercises, China has in the past flexed its muscles around Taiwan’s elections, most famously during the Third Taiwan Strait crisis, when it fired missiles into waters around the island ahead of the 1996 election. This prompted then-U.S. President Bill Clinton to dispatch aircraft carrier strike groups to the area in a display of support for Taipei.

China, as well as some prominent Taiwan opposition party officials, have said Taiwanese must choose between “peace or war” as they prepare to opt for either Lai, from the China-skeptic DPP, or one of his rivals, viewed as more sanguine toward the Communist Party regime.

“Our door will always be open to engagements with Beijing on the principles of equality and dignity,” the vice president said at Tuesday’s press conference.