"The strengths of a teacher and an enemy are the weaknesses of an enemy." Recent disasters around the Gyirong Port in Tibet have caused traffic damage on the G216 line. Chinese officials announced that as of 12:00 on the 31st, the road leading to the Gyirong Port had been opened to about 1.1 kilometers from the port. China Eneng invested 158 emergency rescue personnel and 28 sets of excavators, loaders and other equipment to repair the road through multi-machine slag relays, wading throwing and filling, and layer-by-layer replacement of large stones. It is worth noting that China Aneng is not an ordinary construction company. Its core predecessor came from the Armed Police Hydropower Corps and was transformed into a central enterprise after the reform in 2018. In other words, the CCP has transformed the originally highly militarized engineering force capabilities into a national peacetime major engineering and disaster rescue force. Faced with such an opponent, we cannot refuse to study its effective system just because we oppose the CCP.
What Taiwan really deserves to think about is this kind of "national engineering resilience." If the road is blocked, who can bring heavy machinery to the site immediately? If the bridge is destroyed, who is responsible for erecting an alternative channel? After power, communications, and water supply are interrupted, can the central and local governments immediately form a cross-departmental emergency repair team? The value of China Energy lies not in how spectacular the promotional videos are, but in whether a country can retain professional engineering energy in advance to cope with large-scale disasters or even war damage. Taiwan promotes the defense resilience of the whole society. If all that is left in the end is disaster prevention manuals, evacuation kits and a few drills, it will still be far from enough. True resilience should mean that bridges can be broken, roads can be opened if roads are destroyed, communications can be quickly restored if base stations fall down, and even if ports and airports are damaged, there are pre-planned alternatives. This is where we should "learn from the enemy's strengths."
However, the Geelong incident also exposed another side. In the early stage, the military police and rescue forces entered the disaster area on foot. If they risked going deep before the roads, mudflows and geological conditions were fully understood, and even people got stuck in the mud and increased the rescue load, that would not be bravery worth imitating, but the most taboo secondary risk in disaster rescue. Rescuers must first ensure that they do not become the next to be rescued. Modern disaster relief should emphasize drone reconnaissance, satellite imaging, geological interpretation, communication positioning and engineering equipment coordination, rather than treating "people rushing in first" as a symbol of bravery. After the first batch of live images were released, some Chinese netizens questioned whether they were staged. Whether the relevant scenes are staged or not should still be judged based on the evidence, but these questions themselves have pointed out a long-standing problem in the authoritarian disaster relief system: should we confirm the disaster situation, rescue people and establish reliable information first, or should we let the camera see "the government is here" first?
When facing China, our most dangerous attitude is not to admit that our opponent has strengths, but to pretend that our opponent has no merits because we hate our opponent. Studying your opponents is never about praising them, but to make yourself stronger. Taiwan should study how China's security forces are organized, how equipment is prepositioned, how cross-regional reinforcements are implemented, and how to quickly restore traffic lifelines after major disasters. At the same time, Taiwan should establish the public information, professional disaster relief, and independent supervision mechanisms that a democratic country should have. The true defense resilience of the whole society is not about who is better at shouting slogans, nor about who is better at taking pictures of disaster relief, but when a crisis really strikes, whether the country can save people, secure access, and restore social operations. To understand the enemy's strengths, we must also recognize the enemy's shortcomings, and be able to turn the enemy's strengths into our own capabilities, and turn the enemy's shortcomings into our own vigilance. This is the pragmatic attitude Taiwan should have in facing the threat from China.
