- This measure will affect Taiwanese males born after January 2005.
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| Taiwanese soldiers, in a file image. |
Taiwan extends mandatory military service from four months to a year due to pressure from China: "The threat has become more obvious"
Taiwan will extend the mandatory military service for men from 2024. Currently, it is four months, but it will increase to one year, according to statements by the island's president, Tsai Ing-wen.
Tsai, who held a high-level national security meeting on Tuesday, explained in a subsequent press conference that this decision "has been extremely difficult" after "two years of evaluation."
Chinese military pressure
In recent years, Taipei has seen increasing military pressure from Beijing, which regularly organizes air raids on Taiwan's Air Identification Zone (ADIZ) and military exercises around the island.
The Taiwanese president pointed out that "peace will not fall from the sky", while adding that, in her position as head of the armed forces, she has to "defend the security of the territory and its interests", "make Taiwan survive" and "guarantee a free and democratic way of life for generations to come".
"Given the advance of Chinese authoritarianism, the capacity of the four-month mandatory service does not meet current strategic needs," the president said.
Large scale maneuvers
Conscription for men over the age of 18 had been reduced from 12 months to four months in 2018. However, it will go back to one year for Taiwanese males born after January 2005, Tsai added.
The leader recalled the large-scale military maneuvers a few kilometers from the island carried out last August by the Chinese Army in retaliation for the trip to Taipei by the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, exercises that included live fire and which Taipei described as "a blockade".
"The threat has become more obvious," lamented Tsai, citing the example of the war in Ukraine and its people, whose "will defend their homeland has touched many people."
US military aid
The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense denounced on Monday the presence of 71 Chinese planes in the vicinity of the island last Sunday, a figure that marks a record for the number of planes that participated in a period of 24 hours.
Among them, 47 Chinese Army planes, most of which were fighter jets, crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which in practice is an unofficial border tacitly respected by Taipei and Beijing in recent decades, but which it has been constantly crossed in recent weeks by Chinese forces during military exercises.
For its part, the Chinese Defense Ministry reported "bombing practices" and "alert patrols" in "sea and air zones around the island of Taiwan" on Sunday.
Chinese Army Eastern Theater spokesman Shi Yi described Beijing's actions as "a strong response to the recent increase in collusion between Taiwan and the United States."
Beijing thus replied to the approval last Friday by the United States Congress of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which provides for spending 858,000 million dollars in defense, energy, and national security that includes military aid to Taiwan worth 10,000 million dollars (9,414 million euros).
The conflict between China and the US
Taiwan has been considered a sovereign territory with its own government and political system under the name of the Republic of China since the end of the civil war between nationalists and communists in 1949, but Beijing maintains that it is a rebel province and insists that it return to what called common homeland.
The island is also one of the biggest sources of conflict between China and the United States, mainly because Washington is Taiwan's main arms supplier and would be its greatest military ally in the event of a possible war with Beijing.
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