Taiwan has warned China that it will respond in kind if fired upon after Chinese fighter jets escalated operations around the island, flying repeatedly across the midpoint of the strait that separates it from the mainland.
Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has vowed to reunify it by force if necessary.
Tensions between the two have risen rapidly, particularly after
David Hale, the US under-secretary of state, paid an official visit to Taipei last week as Washington pushed $7 billion of arms sales
including cruise missiles, mines and drones to the island. After the forays by Chinese jets, Taiwan’s defence ministry said that it had clearly defined procedures to deal with the “high frequency of harassment and threats from the enemy’s warships and aircraft” and added that although its soldiers would not fire the first shot they were authorised to fire back if Chinese forces did so.
The defence ministry also sought to assure the public that it had the armaments to defend the island. “The military regularly replenishes its precision missiles in accordance to military restructuring plans,” it said. “The military’s stockpile of precision missiles is sufficient for defensive needs at the present stage.”
Taiwan said that Chinese aircraft, including twelve J-16 fighters, two J-10 fighters, two J-11 fighters and two H-6 bombers, had crossed the midline of the strait, unofficially regarded as a boundary, and entered Taiwan’s southwest air defence identification zone on Saturday. The island’s forces scrambled fighters and deployed an air defence missile system to monitor the activities, the ministry said.
In a tweet it added that it “strongly condemns and urges [China] to practise self-restraint and don’t be a troublemaker in the #indopacific region”.
Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, praised the “heroic performance” of the island’s air force pilots for intercepting the Chinese fighter jets. “I have a lot of confidence in you. As soldiers of the Republic of China, how could we let enemies strut around in our own airspace?” she said, using Taiwan’s formal name.
“I’m aware that facing the provocative behaviour of the communist planes that have encircled the island and damaged regional peace in recent days, your duty at the front line of the airspace in Penghu must be even heavier.”
Yesterday, China’s foreign ministry said that the midline of the Taiwan Strait did not exist, provoking condemnation from Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister. He said the line was an important “symbol” for avoiding military clashes.
“We demand the international community strongly condemns China’s words and actions and demand the Chinese government stops everything that it has been doing,” he added.
The Chinese air force released a propaganda video yesterday featuring its H-6 bomber launching an attack on an island base that strongly resembled US facilities in Diego Garcia and Guam, although it appeared to have borrowed clips from three Hollywood films,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,
The Rock and
The Hurt Locker.