Michael Rubin Says Taiwan Should Prepare To Attack China’s Infrastructure

Aug. 22—In a blood-curdling article published in the National Security Journal, Michael Rubin suggests that Taiwan “learn from the Ukraine’s Kursk offensive” by considering attacks against Chinese infrastructure that would kill millions.

The senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute writes: “If China invades, the key to Taiwan’s defense will be a strong offense. Just as the Biden administration should never have sought to constrain the Ukraine fight to Ukraine itself, Taiwan should not artificially limit its retaliation geographically. Scholar Gordon Chang suggested that Taiwan could kill tens of millions of people by destroying Chinese dams. Even voicing that scenario enhances Taiwan’s deterrence. Taiwanese barrages from its island of Quemoy [Kinmen] to the Chinese city of Xiamen, just a couple kilometers away, could kill tens of thousands.”

The cited reference to “scholar” Gordon Chang refers to a July 2022 report that Chang authored in which he salivates over the potential for Taiwanese missiles to take out China’s largest dam: “China’s [Three Gorges] Dam creates a reservoir of 39.3 billion cubic meters of water on the Yangtze River and is upstream from about 400 million people. Almost 30% of China’s population, therefore, is at risk of a catastrophic failure of the structure, such as one caused by a missile strike. That means Taiwan possesses a conventional weapon that packs the wallop of a nuclear one.”

The perennially wrong laughingstock Gordon Chang is infamously known for his masterpiece The Coming Collapse of China—written in 2001! Chang forecast the collapse of the People’s Republic of China by 2011. When that did not happen, he wrote an article for Foreign Policy in December 2011 in which he (very) slightly updated his prognostication: “Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it.”

Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at AEI, appears to be among the few who continue to take Gordon Chang and his fantasies seriously.