Chill out, US tells China

Beijing goes ballistic – literally - as it fires missiles at Taiwan and Japan

The US has slammed China’s launch of 11 ballistic missiles around Taiwan during military drills as an overreaction to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island and has urged Beijing to decrease tensions.

The US House Speaker was the highest-profile US official to visit Taiwan in years, defying a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory.

After the visit, the Chinese Communist Party launched a series of exercises in multiple zones around Taiwan, straddling some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and at some points just 20km from the democratic island’s shore.

“China has chosen to overreact and use the Speaker’s visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait,” White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

“The temperature’s pretty high,” but tensions “can come down very easily by just having the Chinese stop these very aggressive military drills”.

Taiwan said the Chinese fired 11 Dongfeng-class ballistic missiles “in several batches” and condemned the exercises as “irrational actions that undermine regional peace”. Taipei did not say where the missiles landed or whether they flew over the island.

But Japan, a key US ally, said that of the nine missiles it had detected, four were “believed to have flown over Taiwan’s main island”.

Tokyo has lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing over the exercises, with Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi saying five of the missiles were believed to have landed in Japan’s economic zone.

Taipei’s defence ministry said it had detected 22 Chinese fighter jets briefly crossing the Taiwan Strait’s “median line”.

Beijing has said the drills will last until midday on Sunday.

Beijing has defended the drills as “necessary and just”, pinning the blame for the escalation on the US and its allies.

“In the face of this blatant provocation we have to take legitimate and necessary countermeasures to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.

Military analysts told Beijing’s state broadcaster CCTV that the goal was to practise a possible blockade of the island and contain its pro-independence forces.

“The purpose is to show that the People’s Liberation Army is capable of controlling all the exits of the Taiwan Island,” said Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at China’s Naval Research Institute.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington had contacted Beijing “at every level of government” in recent days to call for calm.