Taiwan keen to boost domestic defence industry amid rising tension with Beijing

Standing on his company’s sprawling campus in central Taiwan, Lin Nan-juh says he is able to make any plane his island’s government calls for.

“We can do whatever’s asked,” says Lin, president of Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation, or AIDC, a leader in the defence industry serving the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own territory to be brought under its control by force if necessary.

It is a bold statement with potentially major significance for Taiwan’s democratic survival as it seeks to build up its domestic defence industry in the face of mainland China’s warnings and the reluctance of foreign arms suppliers to provide it with the planes, ships, submarines and other hardware it needs to defend its 23 million people.

While the US – which is legally bound to respond to threats to Taiwan – continues to be its main arms supplier, Taiwan is increasingly looking to replace those politically fraught, touch-and-go deals with domestic production that is reliable as well as technologically advanced.

Taiwan’s indigenous systems are “both a source of national pride and a product of necessity”, said David An, senior research fellow with the Washington-based policy incubator Global Taiwan Institute. “As it’s commonly said, necessity is the mother of invention.”