As elections approach, China harasses the island with spy balloons and looped messages off the coast

Less than a week before the Taiwanese presidential election, there are more and more signals of Beijing’s interest in this election. This weekend, Taiwan was seriously concerned about the waltz of high-altitude balloons from mainland China.

This weekend, the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense called “serious threat” the presence in its airspace of high-altitude balloons from mainland China. These are the same type of balloons that flew over part of the United States and Canada in February 2023. At the time, a multitude of experts looked into the benefit of using this type of balloon. flying object.

These stratospheric balloons are less detectable and more autonomous than drones and are today capable of carrying a whole electronic arsenal, such as cameras, radio frequency detectors, radars… In short, the Americans ended up destroying above the Atlantic several of these Chinese spy balloons.

Harassment tactics

The Taiwanese defense has only signaled their presence, at an altitude of 8,000 or 10,000 meters beyond the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which separates the archipelago from mainland China. The last balloon parked above the main island for about an hour, Friday January 5, 2024, before disappearing without a trace.

Taiwanese authorities indicate that this is an unusual presence. But it is still the fifth balloon spotted in the sky of Taiwan since the beginning of December 2023. Before that, the Taiwanese were more accustomed to other forms of pressure from Beijing. Indeed, Chinese air force fighter planes regularly cross Taiwanese airspace. Last week, a defense report spotted no fewer than 27 aircraft in illegal overflight positions. It’s the same thing in territorial waters, with Chinese military ships getting closer and closer to the Taiwanese coast. For the spokesperson for the Taiwan Defense Ministry, the balloons are part of the same harassment tactic: “According to our analyses, the recent Chinese balloon flights are part of Beijing’s gray zone war tactics. It is a strategy intended to weaken citizen morale.”

Loop broadcast of propaganda messages

Undermining the morale of the Taiwanese is what the Chinese navy is trying to do, by broadcasting propaganda messages on a loop, a few kilometers from the coast. “As if they were reading a script”, testifies a Taiwanese fisherman on the BBC website. The message states that “The People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government in China” and “Taiwan is an inseparable part of China.”

China considers Taiwan as one of its provinces, which it has not managed to reunify with the rest of its territory since 1949, when the civil war ended. This is what is at stake in the presidential election on Saturday January 13, 2024: the two “Sino compatible” candidates failed to come to an agreement to really weigh in against William Lai, candidate of the progressive party in favor of independence of the archipelago, and hated by the Chinese government. Beijing has therefore been practicing “gray warfare” for several months. A tactic theorized by the famous military strategist Sun Tzu in his famous treatise The art of War. A tactic intended to “subdue the enemy without combat”a form of political interference that does not speak its name.