Repel the Dragon! Jets scrambled as Taiwan braces for a blockade
After Pelosi’s visit, Chinese warships set to surround island
TAIWAN scrambled a squadron of fighter jets last night to ward off a Chinese incursion as Beijing began its threatened intimidation of the island earlier than anticipated.
Taipei was bracing itself for a blockade by China today, with warships and planes set to surround Taiwan at the start of four days of aggressive military drills that will come within ten miles of its coast – and inside its territorial waters.
The six exercises will encircle the island, cutting it off by air and sea. They will heighten fears that China was practising for a possible future invasion, a scenario that has already been brought into focus by the war in Ukraine.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said it would ‘resolutely defend national sovereignty’, but
warned commercial planes and ships to avoid the area as the drills, set to begin at noon today local time, would involve ‘long-range live firing’ and missile launches.
Beijing yesterday sent 27 of its aircraft, including 16 Russian-made Su-30 fighters, into Taipei’s air defence zone in an early act of menace, with 22 jets crossing the Taiwan Strait separating the two countries.
The Chinese war games are a response to the controversial whistle-stop visit to Taipei by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, the most prominent US politician on Taiwanese soil in 25 years.
To Beijing’s fury, she met with the president and human rights leaders yesterday after landing in Taipei on Tuesday night. China considers the visit an affront because it regards Taiwan, an island of more than 23million people, as a breakaway nation and wants to reunify it with the mainland, by force if necessary.
During a press conference yesterday,
Mrs Pelosi said: ‘ Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. America’s determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains ironclad.’
In a rebuke to Beijing, the speaker, a longtime China critic who defied US President Joe Biden to make the trip, added that ‘China has stood in the way of Taiwan’.
She even suggested her sex could be the reason as why there was such an angry reaction, saying, ‘They didn’t say anything when the men came’, in reference to previous US delegations. In a statement released after the Democrat, 82, had left for South Korea to continue a tour of Asia, she said that China ‘cannot prevent world leaders or anyone from travelling to Taiwan to pay respect to its flourishing democracy’. Foreign ministers from the G7 group of nations said in a joint statement: ‘There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait.’
They added that China’s ‘escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilising the region’.
Among those calling for calm was Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. She added of Mrs Pelosi’s visit: ‘It’s perfectly reasonable what is taking place and I urge China to de-escalate.’
The Chinese exercises will lead to a standoff not seen since the mid-1990s, when they were much further away from Taiwan. In 1996, the US navy dispatched two aircraft carriers close to the strait to effectively end the crisis.
Such a move would be more challenging now given China’s military growth, including vastly more capable missiles. Beijing sought to further punish Taiwan yesterday by curbing imports of fruit and fish and halting exports of sand, though it avoided disrupting the flow of microchips, which would send shockwaves through the global economy.