Wu Shang-Su

Taiwan's incoming Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration is about to come face to face with unprecedented vulnerabilities in national security, thanks to a variety of factors which the new government is likely to find difficult to alter in the near future. For more than 30 years from 1949, the modernisation of Taipei's armed forces, particularly its air force and navy investments, followed the lead of Beijing, as Taiwan sought to keep pace with its primary security threat.