China sends military to Ukraine to gain combat experience - Hill
Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia in Ukraine may use their experience in Ukraine to invade Taiwan.
According to Censor.NET, this is the opinion of The Hill columnist Gordon Chang.
"The Communist Party craves first-hand experience of the battlefield in Ukraine to inform its People’s Liberation Army for its future wars. For the PLA, the Ukraine battlefield offers the most livid and brutal evolution of the revolutionary and see-saw battle between unmanned weapons and electronic warfare defenses arrayed against them," Richard Fisher of the Washington, D.C. area-based International Assessment and Strategy Center said.
Fisher is convinced that "if the PLA can grasp and expand on the lessons of the Ukraine battlefield, it can vastly increase its chances of a rapid blitzkrieg victory in Taiwan."
"It is also likely that the Chinese officers are doing more than observing and reporting back to China. They may also be giving advice to their Russian counterparts. China, after all, has been backing Russia’s war effort from the beginning," Chang adds.
He also believes that China almost certainly greenlighted the invasion with its 5,300-word joint statement issued by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2022, just 20 days before the Russian attack. Putin might have invaded earlier, but he evidently acceded to Chinese wishes and waited until after the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics to hit the former Soviet republic.
"Given Beijing’s support to both Moscow and Pyongyang, it is unlikely that North Korea could have joined the war on Russia’s side without China’s approval. With regard to the mercenaries, Beijing probably both knew and approved of their participation in the war," Chang writes.
Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank and a former Canadian diplomat who worked in Beijing, believes that China's sending the first small group to join the Russians is in line with the Chinese communist strategy of first creating plausible deniability and then a veneer of legitimacy to gradually build up its troops on the front lines.
"This will almost certainly be accompanied by the gradual introduction of sophisticated Chinese offensive weaponry," he added.
Burton is also concerned that Russia, indebted to China because of the support in Ukraine, will not be able to say "no" when China demands that Moscow send forces to help it invade Taiwan or another neighbor.
"The Chinese and Russian militaries regularly hold joint drills in East Asia. Therefore, the Pentagon should assume that these two powers, along with North Korea, will fight together during the next war. So China probably sees great advantage in Chinese troops, even if just mercenaries, fighting in Ukraine," Chang concluded.
As a reminder, the Chinese government denies its involvement in the participation of Chinese citizens in Russia's war against Ukraine and states that after clarifying all the circumstances, it will assess the actions of its citizens captured in Donetsk region in accordance with national law.
