Taiwan VP Hsiao outlines efforts to prevent conflict amid China's threats

Taipei, June 20 (CNA) Taiwan is doing everything it can to prevent a military conflict with China, including building up asymmetric defense capabilities and fortifying public resilience, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said in a recent interview.

"Everything we are doing is to prevent a conflict from happening, whether it is 2027 or before that or beyond that," Hsiao said in an interview with American podcaster Shawn Ryan for the "Shawn Ryan Show."

She was referring to a timeline cited by several U.S. military and intelligence officials in recent years who said Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the People's Liberation Army to be ready to take military action against Taiwan by 2027.

Facing China's continued naval expansion and its globally dominant defense manufacturing capacity, Hsiao said Taiwan is focused on "investing in our own defense in an asymmetric way" to complicate Chinese military calculations and deter an attack.

With China continuing to lay claim to Taiwan and enforcing that rhetoric through diplomatic, military and economic tools on a global scale, Taiwan needs to promote the idea that keeping the status quo in the Taiwan Strait is in the best interests of all stakeholders around the world, including China, she said.

In addition to military threats, Hsiao said Taiwan also faced "cognitive warfare, the disinformation, the efforts at dividing our society, weakening our domestic unity and cohesion" from China and that "we are in a race to make ourselves much more resilient."

She said the government is pursuing "whole-of-society resilience" efforts primarily aimed at equipping citizens with the ability to protect themselves, which would ease some of the burden on the government.

While Taiwan is used to responding to earthquakes and other natural disasters, it still needs to work more on first-aid training, improve emergency response capabilities, stockpile critical supplies, and prepare shelters, according to Hsiao.

At the same time, society must change its perceptions about how an emergency response works, she said.

"Historically, [in] every disaster [what] we've had is the military supports civil society. What we haven't really experienced is going the other way around -- our civil society supporting our defense, our military," she said.