Chinese and North Korean Actions Underscore Region’s Volatility
Two Asian hotspots grew a little more tense over the last few days. On 14 October, China staged military drills designed to simulate an attack on Taiwan, and on 15 October, North Korea detonated explosives on the North Korean side of the border with South Korea that destroyed roads connecting the two countries.
Taiwan said it detected 34 Chinese naval vessels and 125 aircraft, including planes, helicopters, and drones, taking part in the exercises, which encircled the island.
Last week, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said “As president, my mission is to ensure that our nation endures and progresses, and to unite the 23 million people of Taiwan. …I will also uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”
China reacted with hostility to this and other parts of Lai’s speech because it sounded like a repudiation of China’s one-China doctrine, which states Taiwan is part of China.
According to the Associated Press, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said the military exercises were “a resolute punishment for Lai Ching-te’s continuous fabrication of ‘Taiwan independence’ nonsense.”
Taiwan has long had major strategic importance in the region. The United States, after years of following a policy dubbed “strategic ambiguity,” changed course under the Biden Administration and said the United States would use its military to defend Taiwan from China.
Approximately 850 miles north of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula also experienced increased tension. The Associated Press described the scene as “a symbolic display of anger” when North Korea detonated explosives to demolish a road that connects the two countries at the border town of Kaesong.
The road was originally built, along with rail lines, in the early 2000s when relations between the two countries had thawed somewhat. South Korea built the roads, with the understanding that the expense of constructing the North Korean sections were loans to be repaid by the North.
The road’s destruction comes several days after North Korea angrily accused the South of flying drones over North Korean capital city Pyongyang. According to the AP, it is also consistent with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un’s pronouncement early in 2024 that the North would no longer seek reconciliation with the South.
North Korea has a history of destroying infrastructure that symbolically showed times of progress between the two countries. It destroyed a joint liaison office on the border in 2020 in retaliation, it said, for the South sending propaganda into the North. More recently, in June, North Korea launched balloons carrying tons of garbage to the South to retaliate against leafletting that groups in South Korea have sent over the border.
The episode underscores how North Korea, which counts China as one of its few allies, continues to threaten to destabilize the region. On several occasions it has launched missiles in the direction of Japan as part of tests or military exercises, the most recent example occurred as recently as 17 September.
Taken together, the incidents underscore how volatile East Asia is. Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at RAND, recently wrote a commentary about the strategic importance of the security alliance, dubbed “the Quad,” between the United States, India, Australia, and Japan, which he said is likely to endure and strengthen in response to continuing threats in the region.
This comes despite diplomatic tensions between Canada and India. In 2023, an agitator to the Indian government was killed on Canadian soil. Canada blamed India, setting off a deterioration in relations between the countries. On 14 October, Canada announced that India’s top diplomat was a person of interest in the assassination. India responded by suspending six Canadian diplomats.
Grossman’s commentary was published before the most recent Canada-India diplomatic escalation; however, he says that the Quad alliance, which was tenuous before, is more solidified now than it has ever been.
“Quad participants are standing pat in large part because their security environment has significantly worsened since 2008,” Grossman said. “There is not just China's rising assertiveness throughout the Indo-Pacific but also North Korea's expanding nuclear program and increasingly confrontational behavior. Japan continues to face constant Chinese patrols around the disputed Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu) in the East China Sea, and it harbors growing concerns over a Taiwan Strait crisis impacting its southwestern Ryukyu Islands.
“Tokyo also worries about North Korean missile tests, some of which have overflown Japanese airspace in the past,” he contunued. “Australia's rising tensions with China, including over Beijing's harsh treatment of Hong Kong, bilateral trade disputes, and alleged Chinese political interference, contributed to Canberra in 2020 conducting a major strategic review that concluded China was its main security threat. India's geostrategic calculations toward China dramatically changed in 2020 after Beijing's military encroachment into Indian-controlled territory along their disputed land border in the Himalayas.”
