FOREIGN AFFAIRS China tests, warns Taiwan with flights
Nation flexing muscles again in signal it could use force to take island
Record-breaking numbers of Chinese military planes probed the airspace near Taiwan over the weekend, prompting Taiwanese fighter jets to scramble and adding muscle to Beijing’s warnings that it could ultimately use force to take hold of the island.
The sorties by nearly 80 People’s Liberation Army aircraft on Friday and Saturday, as China observed its National Day holiday, followed a pattern of Beijing testing and wearing down Taiwan by flying over seas southwest of the island. The most recent flights stood out because of the number and types of planes involved, including bombers and anti-submarine planes on nighttime intrusions.
The flights did not suggest an imminent threat of war over Taiwan, said several analysts, but they did reflect Beijing’s increasingly unabashed signaling that it wants to absorb the self-ruled island and will not rule out military means to do so.
“Coming on Oct. 1, China’s National Day, it sends a message about Beijing’s determination to claim Taiwan, by force if necessary,” said Adam Ni, an Australian analyst of Chinese military policy who is based in Germany. “The aim of this is to assert Beijing’s power and show military muscle.”
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said that the spike in flights began Friday, when 38 Chinese military planes flew into the island’s “air defense identification zone.”
The first group of aircraft included two H-6 bombers and 22 fighter jets, according to the Taiwanese ministry. That night, another two H-6 bombers, accompanied by 10 J-16 fighters, flew into the air zone, turned left off the southern end of Taiwan and headed northeast, parallel to the island’s eastern coast, before turning back, it showed on a map.
On Saturday, 39 Chinese military planes — including fighter jets, two anti-submarine aircraft and an early-warningand-control plane — entered the Taiwanese zone, again breaking the daily record, the ministry said. On Sunday, it said, 16 more planes, including a dozen fighter jets, cut into a corner of the same area of the zone.
Taiwan’s air identification zone dates to the 1950s, laying out the airspace where the island’s authorities assert the right to tell entering planes to identify themselves and their purpose. It is a much larger area than Taiwan’s sovereign airspace, which reaches 12 nautical miles from its coast. The Chinese flights did not enter that sovereign airspace.
“It is very worrying,” said
Chieh Chung, a security analyst with the National Policy Foundation in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. “This puts a lot more pressure on our military, and the more they reach into our airspace, the greater the risk of some kind of accident.”
Taiwan’s defense ministry began regularly releasing records of Chinese military flights into the space in September of last year. Chinese military planes now enter the zone nearly every day, and the latest waves have barely ruffled most people in Taiwan. Officials on the island sounded more worried, however.
“Threatening? Of course,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said on Twitter after the spike of intrusions began Friday. In answer to questions about the Chinese flights, the Taiwanese defense ministry said on Sunday that it was “maintaining a high degree of vigilance and responding appropriately to ensure national security.”