TAIPEI – Taiwan’s defence ministry said on Wednesday that over the past 24 hours it had detected 53 Chinese military aircraft operating around the island.
Taiwan has been on alert since Monday after reporting a spike in Chinese military activity nearby.
Previously, defence ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said the scale of the current Chinese naval deployment in an area running from the southern Japanese islands down into the South China Sea was the largest since China held war games around Taiwan ahead of 1996 Taiwanese presidential elections.
China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory over the island’s rejection, had been expected to launch drills to express its anger at President Lai Ching-te’s tour of the Pacific that ended on Friday, which included stopovers in Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam.
“The current scale is the largest compared to the previous four,” Sun said. “Regardless of whether they have announced drills, they are posing a great threats to us.”
Senior ministry intelligence officer Hsieh Jih-sheng told the same press conference there have so far been no live fire drills in China’s seven “reserved” air space zones, two of which are in the Taiwan Strait, but there had been a significant increase in Chinese activity to the north of Taiwan over the last day.
The number of China navy and coast guard ships in the region, which a Taiwan security source told Reuters remained at around 90, was “very alarming”, and China was taking aim at other countries in the region and not only Taiwan, he added.
China’s deployment in the First Island Chain – which runs from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas – is aimed at area denial to prevent foreign forces from interfering, Hsieh said.
—Reuters
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