(Ministry of National Defense via AP) (Associated Press)TAICHUNG, Taiwan — Standing on his company’s sprawling campus in central Taiwan, Lin Nan-juh says he’s able to make any plane his island’s government calls for. China now has the world’s second-largest defense budget behind the U.S., significantly boosting its ability to blockade, attack and possibly invade Taiwan. Taiwan’s domestic arms industry got started in the 1970s, more than two decades after Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces fled to the former Japanese colony after Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power on the mainland in 1949. “Taiwan’s defense industry obviously has progressed,” making it less reliant on foreign sources, he said. “Taiwan worries that there might be a time that we can’t buy the weapon system that we want, so we better build up our indigenous defense industry capability,” Huang said.

Source: Washington Post May 14, 2018 01:18 UTC