Taiwan is stockpiling supplies to prepare for blockade or attack, official says
- Island has food, energy and other critical supplies in reserve, according to deputy economy minister Chen Chern-chyi
- But he says it would be unrealistic to decouple from mainland China, Taiwan’s largest trading partner
Chen told reporters in Taipei on Wednesday there was a need for the island to keep reasonable stores of important supplies.
“With respect to a possible military conflict, we have made preparations for food and for energy and critical supplies, including manufacturing supplies. We have a system – we do an inventory every month,” Chen said.
“We want to ensure that we have a certain period’s worth stockpiled in Taiwan, including food, including critical supplies, minerals, chemicals and energy of course.”
Like most countries, the US does not recognise Taiwan as an independent state but is opposed to any attempt to take the island by force – something Beijing has not ruled out.
Chen said Taiwan’s energy mix was made up of liquefied natural gas, coal, nuclear power and renewables, and that the government was trying to scale up the latter.
“We remain very comfortable with respect to these possible energy security issues,” he said.
The deputy minister said that while stockpiling of key supplies had slowed in the past two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it had picked up again in recent months.
He did not indicate how big those reserves would need to be for Taiwan to survive a blockade or attack from Beijing.
On whether the island needed to decouple from its heavy trade reliance on mainland China, Chen said it was unrealistic to do so.
“China is our largest trading partner, that is a fact. It is the largest manufacturing factory for the world and the largest trading country in the world [which are] also facts,” he said.
“With those facts, I don’t see, frankly, in the near term we can completely decouple from China. That’s not realistic.”
Everything you need to know about trade between mainland China and Taiwan
Chen said Taiwan was a free-market economy that respected commercial decisions. “So we will continue to see our companies working with their Chinese counterparts for business activities,” he said.
But he said that to protect the island’s economic security, restrictions had been placed on investments in hi-tech and other critical industries in the mainland, and export controls imposed on products like semiconductors.
For decades, mainland China has been the island’s biggest market with more than 40 per cent of Taiwan’s total exports going there annually.
Chen said Taiwan constantly reviewed its export controls and exchanged information with allies.
