Isolated and Threatened, Taiwan Builds Up Domestic Arms Makers

Standing on his company’s sprawling campus in central Taiwan, Lin Nan-juh says he’s able to make any plane his island’s threatened government calls for.

“We can do whatever’s asked,” says Lin, president of Aerospace Industrial Development Corp., or AIDC, a leader in the defense industry serving the isolated self-governing island that China claims as its own territory and threatens to invade.

It’s a bold statement with potentially major significance for Taiwan’s democratic survival as it seeks to build up its domestic defense industry in the face of China’s threats and the reluctance of foreign arms suppliers to provide it with the planes, ships, submarines and other hardware it needs to defend its 23 million people.

While the U.S. — which is legally bound to respond to threats to Taiwan — continues to be its main arms supplier, Taiwan is increasingly looking to replace those politically fraught, touch-and-go deals with domestic production that is reliable as well as technologically advanced.

Taiwan’s indigenous systems are “both a source of national pride and a product of necessity,” said David An, senior research fellow with the Washington-based policy incubator Global Taiwan Institute. “As it’s commonly said, necessity is the mother of invention.”

The self-reliance policy has been strongly promoted by Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Tsai Ing-wen, whose government has been shunned by Beijing since shortly after she took office more than two years ago. Defense is included in Tsai’s economic program targeting eight industries for innovation and…