Taiwan preparing for when — not if — China launches military attack: minister

In an interview with Global News, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said Taiwan is shoring up international support and focusing on military reforms to be "as ready as possible."

Taiwan’s foreign affairs minister says the island is actively trying to prepare for a military attack by China in the coming months or years, and believes it’s only a matter of time before Beijing will move in on the self-governing island.

In an interview with Global News in Taipei, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is shoring up international support and focusing on military reforms to be “as ready as possible” for such an attack, which could come at any time as China displays increasingly “provocative and expansionist” behaviour.

“(An attack) might be in 2025, 2027 or 2035,” he said. “There’s some merit to those analyses.

“But from our perspective, we should not wait for those years to come. We should be prepared. And we are trying to get prepared, no matter whether China is going to launch a war against Taiwan tomorrow or next year or three years down the road.”

China has long claimed Taiwan as its own territory, despite the island having its own democratically-elected government as well as international and economic relationships with other nations, including Canada.

Beijing has aggressively increased its military presence in the Taiwan Strait and in the island’s airspace in recent years, but those moves have further intensified as Taiwan has actively engaged with Western allies this year.

Earlier this month, Taiwanese President Katherine Tsai’s trip through Latin America and the United States — where she held a high-profile meeting with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — sparked days of major Chinese military drills that included temporarily surrounding the island.

“What China wants to do to Taiwan is to eliminate Taiwan’s international support,” Wu said, adding such meetings with U.S. officials date back far before Tsai’s time in office.