Taiwan is China's largest island, and its geographical location is very important to China. Located at the crossroads of the north-south route of the western Pacific Ocean, Taiwan is not only the bridgehead for the Eastward Entry of the Eurasian Continent into the Pacific Ocean, but also the springboard and base for the westward entry from the Ocean to the Eurasian Continent. From the perspective of national strategic security, Taiwan is an important barrier to China's seven coastal provinces, and the tax revenue of these seven provinces is the guarantee for the survival of the country, and to protect China's Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and other economically developed areas, Taiwan is a key factor that must be solved.
From a military point of view, the recovery of Taiwan will allow the PLA Navy to face the vast Pacific Ocean and formally complete the transformation from offshore to far sea. For East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, Taiwan's geographical location is also very important, Japan and South Korea are poor in resources, and more than 75% of their resource transportation needs to pass through the Taiwan Strait, so the Taiwan Strait is also their lifeline.
It is precisely because of the importance of geographical location, Taiwan Island has been a place of contention since ancient times, from the end of the Ming Dynasty, Taiwan has been invaded by the Netherlands, Japan and other powers, until the end of World War II and then returned to the motherland. However, a few years after the end of World War II, the remnants of the Kuomintang forces that had lost successive battles in the civil war at home fled to the island of Taiwan in an attempt to use the Taiwan Strait to compete with the mainland, leaving Taiwan alone overseas.
When New China was first founded, Su Yu served as the commander-in-chief of the attack on Taiwan, and once gathered 650,000 troops in the southeast coastal area to prepare for the liberation of Taiwan. However, due to the outbreak of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, this process was interrupted, and the Ninth Corps, the original main force in attacking Taiwan, was also transferred to the Korean battlefield. After the end of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, the US Navy's Seventh Fleet was still stationed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the port of Keelung, and patrolled the Taiwan Strait; at that time, the US military also supported more than 2,000 fighters to the Kuomintang army, including more than 800 F86 fighters, plus the US military and air force in Taiwan, and its strength was very strong, and the PLA had to temporarily shelve the campaign to liberate Taiwan.
In July 1957, Su Yu, then chief of the General Staff, formulated the "Military Plan for Implementing the Struggle against Taiwan", with the aim of finally recovering Taiwan and liberating China's territory. He envisioned three steps to clear the Kuomintang troops entrenched on the islands on the southeast coast in three years and liberate Taiwan, but for various reasons, Su Yu's plan was not implemented.
Later, the campaign to liberate Taiwan has always become a heart disease of General Su Yu, and on June 3, 1978, su Yu said to Xin Junjie, commander of the Jiangxi Provincial Military Region, and others when inspecting Jiangxi: "Jiangxi's position is very important, it is the direct rear of the liberation of Taiwan, the second echelon. If an all-out war is launched, Jiangxi will be the rear of the three major military districts of Fuzhou, Nanjing, and Guangzhou. According to the recollections of Su Rongsheng, the son of Su Yu, in Su Yu's room, there has always been a map of Taiwan Province.
Although Taiwan has never been liberated, Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo's father and son are still patriotic, especially Chiang Kai-shek, who can be said to be unrelenting to the separatist forces on the island, and has always resisted in the face of provocations from Britain, the United States, and other countries. Chiang Kai-shek has repeatedly declared that both the mainland and Taiwan are Chinese territory, and absolutely no one will be allowed to sever them.
However, after Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988, the continuous rise of separatist forces in Taiwan, especially Lee Teng-hui's coming to power, further fueled this trend and led to the rapid tension in cross-strait relations. From 1995 to 1996, cross-strait relations were extremely tense, and in order to deter the internal separatist forces on the island, the PLA held several large-scale military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. In 1996, the People's Liberation Army began to assemble large-scale troops in the Taiwan Strait for the largest land, sea and air military exercise since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
The 1996 Taiwan Strait exercise was undoubtedly an unforgettable memory for the Chinese soldiers at that time. Although the officers and men of our army had a strong desire to seek war at that time, their weapons and equipment were not good. Although The Kuomintang Navy in Taiwan had only just begun to replace the second-generation ships, even some of the aging old "Yangzi" destroyers were much more advanced than the main force of the PLA at that time, the Type 051, and were much better than our army in terms of anti-ship, air defense, and anti-submarine capabilities.
What makes the Navy most embarrassed is that due to the shortage of combat warships, our army has recruited more than 2,000 civilian ships, and in order to make up for the phenomenon that the firepower is not weak, the army has fixed tanks and cannons to civilian ships and practiced target training at sea. However, the power, accuracy, and rate of fire of the army artillery were far from being comparable to the naval guns, which was a helpless move at the time.
In terms of the air force, the strength of the two sides is actually half a pound, at that time the United States is ready to aid Taiwan's F16 has not yet been in place, although they have two squadrons of Jingguo fighters, but the PLA before the Soviet Union negotiated 24 Su-27 fighters have been in place, and the PLA can also rely on the numerical superiority of the air force to control the air.
The army's weapons and equipment are actually much worse than theirs, but this is not the most troublesome, because with the PEOPLE's liberation army's will to fight, it can make up for the gap in weapons and equipment. The most troublesome thing was that our army lacked enough landing ships and landing craft at that time, and at that time, the whole army only had more than ten large tank landing ships, and the one-time transport of troops was only about one brigade. Some people say that we still have a powerful Second Artillery Corps, but due to the lack of funds in that year, the Second Artillery Corps only prepared more than 200 Dongfeng 15 short-range missiles, and the Beidou navigation system had not yet been built that year, resulting in a great reduction in the accuracy of the missiles.
In the face of the large-scale exercises of the People's Liberation Army, the Kuomintang army has also entered the highest state of alert, and the Kinmen and Matsu occupied by the Kuomintang army are less than ten nautical miles away from the exercise area, and from March 12, 1996, the Taiwan troops stationed in Kinmen and Matsu have all entered the second level of alert, and the local residents have also suspended all social production activities and conducted wartime air defense exercises. The air defense combat units on the main island of Taiwan are even more on first-level alert 24 hours a day.
Dongsha Island is also controlled by the Kuomintang army, but Dongsha Island is only 250 kilometers away from Guangdong and 410 kilometers away from Taiwan. Many of the soldiers on this side were also very nervous at that time, and the most urgent task of the Kuomintang soldiers on the island every day was to learn Mandarin, and Yan Cairen, the commander of the Dongsha garrison at that time, later admitted that he had specially prepared an address book involving the entire Taiwan troops, just so that after the outbreak of war, he could win a glimmer of life for himself.
At that time, many veterans of the People's Liberation Army on the Fujian front had written petitions and suicide notes at the same time, and the front-line combat troops began to shave their heads to prevent them from being badly bandaged or inflamed when they were injured. According to the recollections of some veterans, no one regarded this as an exercise at that time, and even many officers directly said that all the combat materials had been distributed in place, and as long as an order was given, the exercise would immediately become a real war.
Unfortunately, because we were not strong enough at that time, coupled with the emergence of several high-ranking traitors in the army at that time, the exercise plan was exposed, and we had to hastily reduce the scale of the exercise and end it hastily. However, the setbacks of that year did not deter the indomitable people, and in the past 20 years or so, our country has undergone earth-shaking changes in both economic strength and military strength.