Taiwan responds after China sends sole carrier into strait

HONG KONG — Taiwan scrambled F-16 fighter jets and dispatched a frigate to the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday after China sent its sole aircraft carrier into the waterway, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported.

The transit of the aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, came amid rising tensions between Taiwan and China after President-elect Donald Trump broke decades of protocol by speaking on the phone with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, after his election victory. Tsai leads a political party that has traditionally supported Taiwan’s formal independence from China.

Tsai, who is visiting Central America this week, made two calls to officials in Taiwan seeking updates on the Liaoning’s transit, the Central News Agency reported. China’s decision to send the carrier through the waterway that separates it from Taiwan reflects an early foreign policy challenge for Trump.

“It’s a show of force, and I think it is intended in part to intimidate, and that’s worrisome from the U.S. and Taiwan’s point of view because we don’t know how much more they are going to ratchet up these pressures and tensions,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If the Trump administration does see this as a test of U.S. resolve, I suspect they’ll push back pretty forcefully.”

China sent the carrier, which had been conducting exercises in the South China Sea, into the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday morning. Taiwan’s response was the third time in three days that air forces in the region had scrambled jets in response to Chinese military activity, after Japan and South Korea deployed fighters on Monday. Those actions occurred when a squadron of six Chinese bombers and two other aircraft flew over the Sea of Japan.

Taiwan, considered by Beijing to be Chinese territory, has been governed separately since 1949, when Nationalist forces fled to the island after their defeat by the Communists. China views any assertion of Taiwan’s separateness from the mainland — like Tsai’s call with Trump — as an affront to its claim of sovereignty.