Poland’s choice to buy from South Korea instead of neighbouring European countries shows that it trusts the Asian country more in terms of factors like cost and production schedule, he said.

He said South Korea’s defence industry could replicate the success of its other pillar industries, which typically started with heavy state support.

According to the Export-Import Bank of Korea, arms exports during the 2017 to 2021 period jumped 177 per cent from that of the 2012 to 2016 period. In 2021, it exported arms worth a record US$7 billion.

This year, the Government expects to sell another US$10 billion worth of arms to overseas markets.

LOOKING FURTHER FOR BUSINESS

South Korean companies are eyeing countries beyond Europe. 

Mr Oh Kyea-hwan, team leader of the Hanwha Defence Overseas Business Division, told CNA that while the current focus is on the European market due to the big demand caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country is looking further.

“We are also focusing on Asia. We now just export small, small quantities, products to Indonesia, and also the Philippines. But I believe that the market will be growing fast. Also one of the areas that we are targeting is the Middle East and also West Asia, like India,” he said.

In 2000, South Korea ranked 31st on the list of global arms exporters. By 2021, it shot up to eighth place, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

President Yoon Suk Yeol recently said he wants the country to aim for the fourth place on the list.

Dr Yang said that South Korea’s varied climate, which includes extreme weather conditions, is an advantage when it comes to its arms business as makers can factor in climatic conditions.

“Since South Korea is a country with a strange climate, it has dealt with various cases and a lot of data is piled up. Now, it all depends on how much South Korea responds to its customer countries,” he said.

SEOUL: “Simple” and “childish” was how Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, described South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol last month for his offer of aid in exchange for denuclearisation.

Calling Yoon’s offer the “height of absurdity”, she said in a statement carried by the North’s state news agency KCNA: “To think that the plan to barter ‘economic cooperation’ for our honour, (our) nukes, is the great dream, hope and plan of Yoon, we came to realise that he is really simple and still childish.”

“No one barters its destiny for corn cake,” she added.

This week, the North passed a law making its nuclear status irreversible. Kim Jong Un said he would never surrender the weapons even if the country faced 100 years of sanctions.

As of June, North Korea has tested an unprecedented 31 ballistic missiles this year.

Satellite images showed in March it was reactivating its Punggye-ri nuclear weapons test site. Three months later, the United States warned that North Korea could conduct its seventh nuclear test – and its first since 2017 – at “any time”.

Last month, it fired two cruise missiles towards the Yellow Sea after Seoul and Washington started preliminary joint drills in preparation for their long-suspended live field training exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield.

China and Russia round out the nuclear-armed trio at South Korea’s doorstep.

Such neighbours and the increased threat of war are why artificial intelligence engineer Shin Changho believes his country should have nuclear weapons.

“I feel that if South Korea were to possess nuclear weapons, North Korea’s military and diplomatic direction towards us would definitely change,” Shin told the CNA programme Insight.

Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, was designed to help protect South Korea against attacks from North Korea; instead it became the biggest obstacle to relations between Beijing and Seoul in decades when its deployment was announced in 2016.

Fearing the system could allow the US to monitor its capabilities, China declared THAAD a threat to the status quo. The system, which has no offensive strike capacity, led Beijing to declare an unofficial trade war on South Korea, hitting the likes of Lotte Group with business suspensions on spurious grounds, squeezing tourism revenue by suspending sales of package tours to South Korea, and even hurting the K-pop business.

It was an extraordinary moment of Chinese heavy-handedness, and should have been a warning to the US about how Beijing treats its neighbours.

The dovish Moon Jae-in, who came into office the following year, only encouraged future deployments of this strategy by acquiescing to Chinese demands with his “Three Nos” policy: No extra THAAD deployments, no participation in a US-led missile-defence network and no involvement in a three-way alliance with the US and Japan.

His successor Yoon Suk Yeol pledged to expand the THAAD system. There’s no immediate sign of that happening, but Yoon’s administration has rejected the Three Nos and said the matter is “not negotiable”.

Perhaps there’s less at stake now: A zero-COVID Beijing can’t exactly cut off tourists to South Korea this time. But the threat from North Korea hasn’t gone away, even if the rogue nation’s place in the headlines has diminished from the days of “fire and fury”; Pyongyang has already fired more ballistic missiles in 2022 than any other year.

The budget request is for funding to mass produce ground-launched cruise missiles – an extended range version of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries-designed Type 12 missile already in use – to strike ships, and new high-velocity glide ballistic missiles capable of hitting ground targets.

The ministry is also seeking money to develop other projectiles, including hypersonic warheads.

The ministry did not give a range for the proposed weapons, or say how many it planned to field, but they would likely be able to reach targets in China if deployed along Japan’s nearby southwest Okinawa island chain.

Japan has already ordered air-launched missiles, including the Joint Strike Missile (JSM) made by Norway’s Kongsberg and Lockheed Martin Corp’s Joint Air-to-Surface Stand-Off Missile (JASSM) with a range of up to 1,000 km.

Unlike with ship or ground-based launchers, however, the number it can fire is limited by how many planes it can put in the air to fire them.

Without question, the Bill’s symbolic measures make for good domestic politics in the US. After all, China is one of the rare topics of bipartisan agreement in Washington these days.

Yet, the Bill’s playing with symbols risks crossing Beijing’s red lines. Given that Xi has so publicly staked an important part of his legacy on reunifying Taiwan and bringing it under the Chinese Communist Party’s control, Washington should not underestimate the lengths he will go to for taking back the island state.    

Due to the considerable discrepancy between the People’s Liberation Army’s annual budget of 1.45 trillion yuan (US$212 billion) and that of Taiwan (US$19.4 billion), additional measures that bolster Taiwan’s ability to protect itself and build an asymmetric porcupine defence strategy need to be further emphasised in the proposed law. 

As the Bill goes through committee and the amendment process, Members of Congress should weed out those aspects focused on political symbolism and instead strengthen those provisions that enhance the security of the Taiwanese people, deter a Chinese invasion, support the island’s thriving democracy and economy, as well as promote and contribute to the stability of the overall US-China relationship. 

Part of this ought to include a robust US-Taiwan trade deal. Other friendly countries should also enhance their commercial and trade ties to Taiwan to fight against Beijing’s ongoing attempts to isolate Taipei. 

These moves ought to be accompanied by renewed diplomatic efforts by the Biden administration to convey that Washington does not seek to dismantle its One China policy, nor does it support formal independence for Taiwan. An opportune time for this will be during Biden’s and Xi’s scheduled in-person meeting this November in Southeast Asia, Xi’s first international trip in nearly three years. 

Perhaps the most important thing that Biden must communicate is that, despite the many tensions in the complicated US-China relationship, war is not inevitable. Both sides need to recommit to risk management in the Pacific and work together on navigating peacefully the region’s troubled waters.  

Ted Gover, PhD, is Associate Clinical Professor at Claremont Graduate University.

Taiwan recorded incursions by around 970 Chinese warplanes into its air defence zone in 2021, more than double the roughly 380 in 2020.

The figure this year has already exceeded 980, with more than 360 incursions recorded in August alone.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the budget gave full consideration to the “enemy threat”.

“In the face of the Chinese communists’ continuous expansion of targeted military activities in recent years and the normalised use of warships and military aircraft to raid and disturb Taiwan’s surrounding seas and airspace, the military adheres to the principle of preparing for war without seeking war and defending national security with strength,” it added.

Assoc Prof Chong said that Taiwan’s ramped-up defence spending would send a signal to the US, neighbouring Japan and other countries.

“That Taiwan is taking its own defence seriously and is ready to hold off any armed aggression from the PRC as best it can. This move intends to reinforce the view that Taiwan is a reliable partner,” he said.

“Taipei is also signalling to Beijing that any use of force could be potentially costly, even if it is able to win eventually.”

Dr Ho said that the ongoing tensions in the Taiwan Strait remain a key flashpoint in Asia and would be watched by most governments in the region. 

Both Taiwan and China’s recent moves to expand their militaries “demonstrates that certainly there is cause for concern”, he told CNA938 in an interview.

In March, China said it would spend 7 per cent more on defence this year, setting the spending figure at US$211.62 billion.

“Ultimately military capabilities are a function of threat assessment, so it’s really about how these intentions are being interpreted by policymakers that will determine how these capabilities will be put to use or not put to use,” said Dr Ho.

China has not commented on the footage, which has received millions of views on Chinese social media with users making fun of it.

It has also triggered heated discussion in Taiwan, with some social media users calling the incident a “humiliation” for the island’s armed forces and urging the defence ministry to step up its countermeasures to the increasingly frequent drone incursions.

The Kinmen defence command said the footage was another example of China’s “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan and an attempt to “denigrate” its armed forces.

Wang Ting-yu, a senior lawmaker of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, described the incident as “very serious” and questioned why Taiwan’s defence ministry did not respond to the incursion.

“The drone was flying on top of our soldiers on guard but there’s zero response,” he said. “If you just let them come and go freely, this was negligence of duty.”

Taiwan has controlled Kinmen, along with the Matsu islands further up China’s coast, since the defeated Republic of China government fled to Taipei after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949.

At its closest point, Chinese-controlled territory is only a few hundred metres from Kinmen.

TAIPEI: Taiwan unveiled a proposed 12.9 per cent year-on-year increase in its defence budget for 2023 to T$415.1 billion (US$13.72 billion) on Thursday (Aug 25) amid tensions with China, which has sharply increased military activities near the democratically governed island.

China, which claims Taiwan as its territory despite the strong objections of the government in Taipei, carried out its largest-ever military exercises around the island after a visit this month by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

On top of the proposed budget, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s Cabinet is proposing an additional T$108.3 billion in spending for fighter jets and other equipment.

The proposal, which is a record high and must be approved by parliament, marks the island’s sixth consecutive year of growth in defence spending since 2017.

That proposed spending accounts for 14.6 per cent of the government’s total spending for next year and is the fourth-largest spending segment, after social welfare and combined spending on education, science and culture, and economic development.

The island last year announced an extra defence budget of US$8.69 billion by 2026, which came on top of its yearly military spending, mostly on naval weapons, including missiles and warships.

In March, China said it would spend 7.1 per cent more on defence this year, setting the spending figure at 1.45 trillion yuan (US$211.62 billion), though many experts suspect that is not the true figure, an assertion the government disputes.

China has been continuing its military activities near Taiwan, though on a reduced scale.

Live-fire drills will take place in a coastal part of China’s Fujian province on Friday and Saturday, just north of the tiny Taiwan-controlled Wuchiu islands in the Taiwan Strait, Fujian authorities said on Wednesday, announcing a no-sail zone.

Last year, Taiwan recorded incursions by around 970 Chinese warplanes into its air defence zone, according to a database compiled by AFP, more than double the roughly 380 in 2020.

The figure this year already exceeded 980, with more than 360 incursions being recorded in August alone.

The increased activity puts further stress on Taiwan’s outgunned military resources, especially its ageing fleet of fighter jets.

“There have been significant increases in operation maintainance in response to the cross-strait situation, as our aircraft and naval ships have been (increasingly) deployed,” budgeting chief Chu Tzer-ming told reporters.

Taiwanese President Tsai has made modernising the armed forces – well-armed but dwarfed by China’s – a priority.

China is spending on advanced equipment, including stealthy fighters and aircraft carriers, which Taiwan is trying to counter by putting more effort into weapons such as missiles that can strike far into its giant neighbour’s territory.

China has not ruled out using force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying that the People’s Republic of China has never ruled the island and that only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.

Meeting visiting Japanese academics at her office on Thursday, Tsai reiterated that the determination to protect their sovereignty, freedom and democracy would not change “due to pressure or threats”.

“At the same time, as a responsible member of the international community, Taiwan will not provoke incidents nor escalate conflicts,” Tsai said, in comments made live on her social media pages.

TAIPEI: Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has visited sailors in the island’s navy to thank them for their efforts amid days of war games and military drills by China, calling the pressure they had faced “indescribable”.

China, which claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has been staging such exercises this month to show its anger at the visit to Taipei of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Visiting the Suao naval base on Taiwan’s northeastern coast late Thursday (Aug 18), Tsai told sailors that fulfilling their mission in the tight confines of a ship must have been difficult.

“In the face of China’s harassment and provocation outside Taiwan’s territorial waters, it is even more necessary to keep an eye on the dynamics of enemy ships all the time. The pressure is so great that it is indescribable,” Tsai said, according to footage released by the defence ministry.

The military has shown firm and unwavering courage and responded calmly, guarding maritime security and maintaining regional peace, she added.

Taiwan is like a navy ship, Tsai said.

“Although it sometimes encounters unpredictable winds and waves, as long as the comrades on board are united, they can overcome all the challenges in front of them. This is the spirit of the Taiwanese people, but also the spirit of naval officers and sailors.”

Tsai has repeatedly said that Taiwan would neither escalate conflict nor provoke during the crisis, and the island’s defence ministry has stressed its “calm” response to the Chinese activities.

Although the scale of China’s drills is much reduced from earlier in the month, Taiwan continues to report Chinese fighters and warships operating around the island.