THE country launched military drills around Taiwan, sending jets and warships in what has been perceived as a “warning” to “separatists” on the self-ruled island.The exercise yesterday is the latest show of force by Beijing, which sees Taiwan as its territory.
China has ramped up warplane flights into Taiwan’s so-called Air Defence Identification Zone since the 2016 election of former president Tsai Ing-wen, who considers the island “already independent”.
Taipei said in April 2023 it had detected the long-range TB-001 Chinese combat drone and 37 other Chinese aircraft circling Taiwan.
Local media said it was the first time Taiwan’s Defence Ministry had reported a Chinese military aircraft circling the island from one end of the Taiwan Strait’s median line, which China does not recognise, to the other.
Beijing now deploys planes and naval vessels around Taiwan on a near-daily basis, with Taipei authorities detecting as many as 43 Chinese military aircraft around the island over a 24-hour period last month.
Beijing unleashed its largest military exercises around Taiwan in August 2022, after then-United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew the ire of China’s Communist Party government by visiting the island.The drills ran for at least five days and involved what Beijing called a “conventional missile firepower assault” in waters to the east of Taiwan.
They were followed by more drills that month after another delegation of US lawmakers visited Taipei.
A record 446 warplanes entered Taiwan’s air defence zone that month, claimed Taipei’s Defence Ministry.
Just a month later, Taiwanese forces shot down a drone for the first time on tiny Shiyu Islet, which lies between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan’s Kinmen islands.
China went on to deploy 71 warplanes in military exercises around Christmas that year, which the Chinese People’s Liberation Army said were a “strike drill” responding to unspecified “provocations” and “collusion” between the United States and Taiwan.
Beijing yesterday said the drills were “a legitimate and necessary operation for safeguarding state sovereignty and national unity”. — AFP
