How to Stop China from Invading Taiwan? Submarines.

8, to be exact. 

Kyle Mizokami [2]

The country with perhaps the most dire need for a modern submarine force in the industrialized world actually has the oldest. Fully half of Taiwan’s submarine force consists of World War II–era boats, while the other half is “just” forty years old. The result is a force that is unable to respond to China’s submarine fleet and cannot adequately protect the country from invasion.

The end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 resulted in a split between the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan. The Taiwan Strait, a narrow section of the Pacific separating the two Chinas, is anywhere from 80 to 200 miles wide. Although relatively narrow, the presence of the strait—or “The Black Ditch” as mariners used to call it—has prevented one side from conquering the other and settling the China problem by force.

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From the end of the war to the 1990s, Taiwan enjoyed a slowly ebbing naval superiority that prevented a Chinese Communist invasion. China simply did not have the sealift to transport hundreds of thousands of troops across the strait and conquer Taipei, nor did it have the surface fleet and air force to support an invasion. A consistent double-digit increase in Beijing’s defense spending since 1992, however, has slowly but surely swung the pendulum to the side of the Communists.