China increases its harassment of Taiwan
CHINA has been showing a new intensity and military sophistication as it steps up its harassment of Taiwan, with record numbers of military flights near the island over the last week.
China’s People’s Liberation Army flew 56 planes in international airspace off the coast of Taiwan on Monday, setting a record and capping four days of sustained pressure involving 149 flights.
China, with growing diplomatic and military power, has been facing greater criticism from countries in the region as Taiwan pleads for more global support and recognition.
The United States called China’s latest actions “risky” and “destabilising”, while China – which claims Taiwan as its own and asserts its territorial ambitions in the region – responded that America selling weapons to Taiwan and its ships navigating the Taiwan Strait were provocative. At the same time as the flights, the US stepped up naval manoeuvres in the Indo-Pacific with its allies.
Taiwan’s defence minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, said that the situation “is the most severe in the 40 years since I’ve enlisted”. While most agree that war is not imminent, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, warned that more was at stake if Beijing made good on past threats to seize the island by force if necessary.
“If Taiwan were to fall, the consequences would be catastrophic for regional peace and the democratic alliance system,” she wrote in an impassioned article in Foreign Affairs magazine. “It would signal that in today’s global contest of values, authoritarianism has the upper hand over democracy.” China regularly flies military aircraft into Taiwan’s “air defence identification zone” – international airspace that Taiwan counts as a buffer in its defence strategy – although previous flights have usually involved a handful of planes at most.
Perhaps more significant than the number of planes was the make-up of the group, with fighters, bombers and airborne early-warning aircraft, Euan Graham, a defence analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, said.
“That’s the level of sophistication – it looks like a strike package, and that’s part of the step-up in pressure,” he added. “This is not a couple of fighters coming close and then going straight back after putting one wing across the median, this is a much more purposeful manoeuvre.”
Controlling Taiwan and its airspace is key to China’s military strategy, with the area where the most recent sorties took place also leading to the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. The latest manoeuvres bring the total number of flights to more than 815, as of Monday, since Taiwan’s government started publicly releasing the numbers a little more than a year ago.
As China was conducting its most recent flights, 17 ships from six navies – the US, the UK, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand– carried out joint manoeuvres off the Japanese island of Okinawa, north-east of Taiwan, meant to show their commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific”.
A few days earlier, the Devonport-based British frigate HMS Richmond transited through the Taiwan Strait, announcing its presence on Twitter and angering China, which condemned the move as a “meaningless display of presence with an insidious intention”.