China holding military drills around Taiwan
Air, sea patrols are reprisal for leaders’ meeting
China began three days of military exercises around Taiwan on Saturday in what it called a “stern warning,” after the island’s president, Tsai Ingwen, met this past week with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, in a show of Taiwanese-US solidarity.
The People’s Liberation Army said it was holding air and sea “combat readiness” patrols and drills on all four sides of Taiwan, including the strait between the island and China, in what appeared to be a concerted burst of retaliation over that meeting, which took place in California on Wednesday.
Authorities also announced a live-fire exercise on waters near Pingtan, an island just off the Chinese coast facing Taiwan. Additionally, Taiwan’s defense ministry said that as of Saturday afternoon, China had sent 71 military aircraft into the skies around the island, including 45 that crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait, an informal boundary between the two sides. That was a jump from the usual number of such sorties.
“This is a stern warning against the collusion and provocations of the ‘Taiwanese independence’ separatist forces and external forces,” Colonel Shi Yi said in a statement announcing the drills. He was speaking on behalf of the Chinese military’s Eastern Theater Command, which oversees the region encompassing Taiwan.
China asserts that Taiwan, a democracy of 23 million people, is part of its territory and must accept eventual unification, and has threatened to use armed force if hopes for peaceful unification are entirely lost. Beijing has accused Tsai, who has rejected China’s preconditions for talks, of pursuing independence for Taiwan, and Shi said the exercises were “necessary to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said Saturday that Beijing should not “misjudge the situation, escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait and in the region, and damage cross-strait relations.”
China’s display of military force had echoes of August, when the previous speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taipei and met Tsai in a show of solidarity. But China’s response this time appeared — initially, at least — to be more limited than the one after Pelosi’s visit. Last year, Beijing fired missiles into waters around Taiwan and held days of exercises simulating a blockade of the island.
“This, of course, is very clearly a response to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting,” Shu Hsiao-huang, a researcher at the Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-funded body in Taipei, said of China’s latest military activities around Taiwan.
“The possibility of additional actions can’t be excluded, but I’d guess that they will not go beyond this scope.”
Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy was the highest-level political reception that a Taiwanese president has received in the United States since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
Since then, Taiwanese leaders have visited the United States only on informal transit stops, and Tsai has made such visits in the past with relatively little reaction from China. But Beijing — angered over Taiwan’s increasingly warm relations with Washington — has become more vociferously opposed to any meetings between Tsai and foreign politicians.
“The Taiwan issue is the most important, most core, and most sensitive issue in the China-US relationship,” a commentary in the Liberation Army Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese military, said Saturday. It said that for Tsai and McCarthy to “meet in any form or for any excuse amounts to an upgrade in US-Taiwan contacts and is a major political provocation.”
But China appears to be trying to calibrate its response to Tsai’s meetings in the United States with McCarthy, with an eye on the reverberations in Taiwan and internationally.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has been trying to stabilize relations with Western countries, especially in Europe. The People’s Liberation Army began its exercises only after French President Emmanuel Macron and a former Taiwanese president, Ma Yingjeou, had finished their visits to China. Ma’s Nationalist Party generally favors closer ties with China.
In responding to Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy, Beijing also has an eye on Taiwan’s presidential election in January, when Chinese leaders hope that a Nationalist candidate can prevail over a contender from Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, experts have said. (After two terms in office, Tsai must step down next year.) An intense Chinese show of force could hamper Nationalist efforts to make its case to voters, said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Chengchi University in Taipei.
“Unless they really pull out the stops, I don’t think it will sway electoral trends,” he said of China’s military exercises. “But if they did pull out all the stops, then this issue of cross-strait relations and China’s threats would be front and center.”