China‘s war games with Taiwan took a serious turn after Beijing deployed its largest navy fleet in regional waters in nearly three decades.
This is posing an alarming threat to the island nation, its Defence Ministry said.
Defence Ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said that 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 1996.
China had held war games around Taiwan ahead of the 1996 Taiwanese Presidential elections.
China’s military is yet to comment and has not confirmed it is carrying out any exercises.
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.
The tour which included stopovers in Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam, ended on Friday.
Taiwan‘s military raised its alert on Monday after saying China had reserved airspace and deployed naval and coast guard vessels.
“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 said at the same Press conference there have so far been no live fire drills in China’s seven “reserved” air space zones.
Of these, two 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 Chinese Navy and Coast Guard ships in the region, was “very alarming”.
He added that China was taking aim at not only Taiwan but other countries in the region as well.
A Taiwan security source told Reuters that the number of the Chinese Navy and Coast Guard ships in the region remained at 90.
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.
The ministry said that the Chinese Navy is building two “walls” in the Pacific.
While one is at the eastern end of Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone, the other is further out in the Pacific.
“They are sending a very simple message with these two walls: trying to make the Taiwan Strait an internal sea” of China, said Hsieh.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Defence Ministry said it detected 47 military aircraft operating around the island over the past 24
hours,
The ministry also detected a dozen Navy vessels and nine “official” ships, which refers to vessels from ostensibly civilian agencies such as the Coast Guard.
Of the aircraft, 26 flew in an area to the north of Taiwan off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, six in the Taiwan Strait and a further 15 to the island’s southwest.
The ministry provided these details in a map in its daily morning statement on Chinese activities.
A senior Taiwan security source told Reuters that the Chinese aircraft simulated attacks on foreign naval ships and practised driving away military and civilian aircraft as part of a “blockade exercise”.
Lai and his government reject Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.
China says the Taiwan issue is the “core of its core interests” and a red line the United States should not cross.
China has held two rounds of major war games around Taiwan so far this year.
(With inputs from Reuters)
