Beijing barges into Taiwan independence ‘culprits’

Images of new Chinese naval barges raise concerns of a potential island invasion as relations with Taipei continue to worsen.

Images of new Chinese naval barges raise concerns of a potential island invasion. Picture: AFP

Beijing has called for “compatriots” to report Taiwan independence “culprits” as already poisonous relations with Taipei continue to worsen amid concerns about American reliability in the Trump era.

China’s latest threats to Taiwan come weeks after President Lai Ching-te became the first Taiwanese leader to openly call China a “foreign hostile force,” as Beijing launched military patrols around Taiwan, which it said were to punish Mr Lai’s “separatism” and “collusion” with America.

Days after the Taiwanese president’s comments on foreign infiltration, pictures circulated on Chinese social media revealed a new class of landing barge, which military analysts say Beijing has designed for use in a potential invasion of Taiwan.

The pictures and video show a fleet of special flat-bottomed barges, called the Shuqiao class, which appear to have been designed for an amphibious landing on the island - which some have compared with the boats involved in the D-Day landings in Normandy of WWII.

Three of the jack-up barges were deployed in tandem on an unidentified beach in China’s southern province of Guangdong, home of the PLA Navy’s South Sea Fleet.

Satellite imagery had previously identified the unusual vessels being constructed in a shipyard in Guangzhou, the province’s capital.

Pictures show the hulking grey vessels standing on thick pylons and connected by a series of retractable bridges. Analysts said the drop-down bridges could expand the range of landing sites for a Chinese invasion beyond the 20-odd beaches in Taiwan deemed suitable for a conventional assault.

“The Shuqiao barges are not a panacea that can overcome all difficult landing conditions, but they definitely provide PLA planners with more options along far greater stretches of Taiwan’s coastline,” said Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the China Maritime Studies Institute.

Photos of the three amphibious jack-up barges at a beach in southern China have appeared on Chinese social media.

An annual report by America’s peak intelligence agency released this week said, based on its best assessment, the PLA was “probably making steady but uneven progress on capabilities it would use in an attempt to seize Taiwan”.

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community said while Beijing maintained a preference for what it calls “peaceful unification” with Taiwan, it would “likely apply strong coercive pressure… to further its goal of eventual unification” in the coming year.

A graphic of how the barges could be used as part of a Chinese amphibious invasion fleet. Image: Naval News

The latest tensions with Taiwan come after Beijing announced a new “reporting column for heinous acts of ‘Taiwan Independence’” late on Wednesday (local time) in an apparent response to Taipei’s revoking of the residency visa of a Chinese social media influencer who was living on the island until her departure this week.

Liu Zhenya, a Chinese social media influencer who calls herself “Yaya in Taiwan” and is married to a Taiwanese man, had posted a video on the Chinese social media platform Douyin praising People’s Liberation Army drills conducted around the liberal democracy.

“Maybe tomorrow morning, the island will be filled with five-star red flags,” she said, referring to the People’s Republic of China’s flag. “Just thinking about it makes me happy.”

That video was widely circulated among her 500,000 followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, including by a media outlet controlled by Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

The controversial influencer’s departure from Taiwan came weeks after President Lai’s comments about China.

President Lai, who is loathed in Beijing and by many in Taiwan’s opposition, last fortnight said China had been trying to “divide, destroy and subvert us from within”.

Opposition leaders accused Mr Lai of putting Taiwan’s future at risk. “This is the first time in over 30 years that a sitting leader of the Republic of China has officially classified the other side of the strait as a quasi-wartime adversary,” said Kuomintang party chairman Eric Chu, using Taiwan’s official name.

Taiwanese politics has been fractious since Mr Lai’s election win in January 2024. While Mr Lai won the presidency, his independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party lost control of Taiwan’s parliament.

Opposition parties recently used their majority to reject the President’s proposal to increase Taiwan’s military budget, infuriating some in Washington.

Jon Czin, director for China at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, said despite the Chinese military’s increasingly sophisticated capabilities, a wave of recent purges had revealed that China’s leader Xi Jinping ”doesn’t have confidence in the PLA”.

Mr Czin, who staffed all of President Joe Biden’s interactions with China’s leader, said he was not convinced that Mr Xi deemed the return of Taiwan during his time in office as essential to his legacy.

”I don’t think he necessarily needs to, quote, unquote, ‘solve the problem’. But I think as he gets towards the end of his life, or towards the end of his tenure in office, I think to have less than what he had in his first term [when relations between Beijing and Taipei were much better than today] is probably unacceptable to him,” said Mr Czin, now a China analyst at the Brookings Institution, in an interview with China-focused newsletter Sinocism.”

”He’s not violent the way Putin is and not willing to take the same kind of risks… But that calculus could change. He could get nastier as he gets older, as the PLA becomes more capable. But I don’t think that’s where we’re at right now.”