Taiwan extends compulsory military service to one year

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said Taiwan will extend the period of compulsory military service from four months to one year from 2024.

Taiwan, which split from mainland China in 1949 during a civil war, is claimed by its neighbors and faces military, diplomatic and trade pressure from it.

The decades-long threat of Chinese access to the self-governing island has intensified since China cut off communications with the island’s government following the 2016 election of Qi Sai (MS), a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing regards as independent.

In response, Taiwan’s military actively tracks these movements, often as training for its own military personnel.

The longer military service, which applies to men born after 2005, will begin on January 1, 2024. Anyone born before 2005 will continue to serve for four months, but under an improved training curriculum designed to bolster the island’s reserves.

“No one wants war,” Ms Tsai said. “Taiwan’s government and people are like this, and the international community is like this, but peace doesn’t just fall from the sky, and Taiwan is at the frontline of authoritarian expansion.”

Taiwan’s current four-month conscription requirement has been widely criticized by the public as too short to provide the training a professional soldier actually needs.

The government shortened it from one year to four months when it transformed the army into an all-volunteer regiment in 2017.

Of Taiwan’s 188,000 military personnel, 90 percent are volunteers and 10 percent are male soldiers who have served for four months.

“This is one of the fundamental steps that should have been done a long time ago,” said Paul Huang, a researcher at the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation.

Mr Huang said the implementation period, when Taiwan will elect a new president in 2024, meant Tsai was “passing the buck” to her successor.

But among the youngest group, 20-24, 37.2 percent said they opposed the extension, while only 35.6 percent said they supported it.

When U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, China responded with its largest military drill in decades, as it considered Ms Pelosi’s visit an official diplomatic exchange.

Although the United States is Taiwan’s largest unofficial ally, the two governments technically do not have diplomatic relations because Washington does not officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state.