The president of the Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, presented this Thursday the prototype of a partially indigenous submarine. “This day will go down in history,” Tsai Ingwen said from the Kaohsiung shipyards. “They said it was impossible and here it is.”
The independence policy launched the project in 2016, in another of its challenges to the People’s Republic of China. However, the prototype is far from ready, although it was difficult to assess its condition, as it is completely enveloped by a gigantic Taiwanese flag.
The Haikun, as it is called, should be completed in 2025, according to Tsai, although it could take between one and three more years to enter service, according to experts. She will then join the two war submarines that Taipei acquired from the Dutch navy in the 1980s.
Despite being presented as a ship of “Taiwanese manufacture and design”, with a cost of 1,455 million euros per unit – the plan would be to launch up to seven more – in reality 60% of its components are foreign – according to the person in charge. from the CSBC shipyards – although its origin has not been detailed. In any case, the American company Lockeed Martin is the winner of the weapons devices.
Tsai Ingwen was accompanied by American diplomat Sandra Oudkirk, head of the American Taiwan Institute, which is a legation in all but name, just as the ROC’s “embassy” in Washington is called the Office Economic and Cultural Center of Taipei, where Hsiao Bi-khim – daughter of a Presbyterian pastor and an American woman – is in fact one of the “diplomats” who rubs shoulders most with Joe Biden’s team.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of the People’s Republic of China has called Taiwan’s naval plans “pointless stupidity, like trying to prevent us from accessing the Pacific Ocean.” The People’s Liberation Army has dozens of submarines, six of them nuclear-powered.
The presentation of the prototype comes at a time of tension between Beijing and Taipei, which on September 18 recorded a record number of incursions by the Chinese Army, with the presence of 103 aircraft in its vicinity, while on the 11th it had detected more than 20 ships.
Next January, Taiwanese will go to the polls again. One of the candidates, the billionaire founder of Foxconn, Terry Gou, has stated that he will run “to prevent Taiwan from becoming another Ukraine.” In other words, in a ring in which the great powers settle scores.
Since 1949, the Republic of China – today with 24 million inhabitants – and the People’s Republic of China – with 1,425 million – have competed to represent China. In 1979, the United States surrendered to reality and stopped recognizing Taipei, to the benefit of Beijing, in line with the plan formulated years before by Henry Kissinger to deepen the gap between the communist governments of China and the Soviet Union.
Today, only a handful of states formally recognize Taiwan in place of China, most notably Guatemala, Paraguay, and the Vatican. Reunification is an article of faith for Beijing, which still feels the loss of control of the island in 1895, when it became a colony of Japan, as a humiliation.
The presentation of the Taiwanese war submarine prototype took place on the same day that, on the other side of the Strait of Formosa, in Fujian, the Chinese government inaugurated the bullet train that since yesterday links the large cities of that province, Fuzhou, Xiamen and Zhangzhou, in less than an hour, at a top speed of 350 kilometers per hour. It is the first Chinese bullet train that connects various bays, circulating part of the journey over the sea, near the coast.
In Beijing’s plans, this conurbation is intended to support a future reintegration of Taiwan, in the same way that Shenzhen – a fishing village thirty years ago – has grown enormously to surpass Hong Kong in population and, since 2018, also in wealth creation.
In fact, two weeks ago, the deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, Cong Liang, revealed China’s ability and willingness to extend to the Taiwan archipelago the high-speed network that was inaugurated yesterday on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. Formosa.
