Taiwan: China military drills appear to simulate an attack
BEIJING — Taiwan said Saturday that China’s military drills appear to simulate an attack on the self-ruled island, after multiple Chinese warships and aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei that infuriated Beijing.
Taiwan’s armed forces issued an alert, dispatched air and naval patrols around the island, and activated land-based missile systems in response to the exercises, the Ministry of National Defense said.
China’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement Saturday that it had carried out military exercises as planned in the sea and airspaces to the north, southwest and east of Taiwan, with a focus on “testing the capabilities” of its land strike and sea assault systems.
China launched livefire military drills following Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last week, saying it violated the “one China” policy. China sees the island as a breakaway province to be annexed by force if necessary, and considers visits to Taiwan by foreign officials as recognizing its sovereignty.
Taiwan’s army also said it detected four unmanned aerial vehicles flying in near the offshore county of Kinmen on Friday night and fired warning flares in response.
The drones, which Taiwan believed were Chinese, were spotted over waters around the Kinmen island group and the nearby Lieyu Island and Beiding islet, according to Taiwan’s Kinmen Defense Command.
Kinmen, also known as Quemoy, is a group of islands about 6 miles east of the Chinese city of Xiamen in Fujian province
in the Taiwan Strait, which divides the two sides that split amid civil war in 1949.
“Our government & military are closely monitoring China’s military exercises & information warfare operations, ready to respond as necessary,” Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen said in a tweet.
The Chinese military exercises began Thursday and are expected to last until Sunday. Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, while the U.S. has deployed numerous naval assets in the area.
The Biden administration and Pelosi, D-Calif., have said the U.S. remains committed to a “one China” policy, which recognizes Beijing as the government of China but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi’s visit.
China has also cut off defense and climate talks with the U.S. and imposed sanctions on Pelosi in retaliation for the visit.
While in the Philippines on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China should not hold hostage talks on important global matters such as the
climate crisis.
“We should not hold hostage cooperation on matters of global concern because of differences between our two countries,” Blinken said. “Others are rightly expecting us to continue to work on issues that matter to the lives and livelihood of their people as well as our own.”
Blinken appeared in an online news conference with his Philippine counterpart in Manila after meeting newly elected President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and other top officials.
Meanwhile, cyberattacks aimed at bringing down the website of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had doubled between Thursday to Friday, compared with similar attacks ahead of Pelosi’s visit, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency. The ministry did not specify the origin of the attack.
Other ministries and government agencies, such as the Ministry of Interior, also faced similar attacks on their websites, according to the report.
A distributed-denialof-service attack is aimed at overloading a website with requests for information that eventually crash it.