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China Says It Will Hold Military Drills Around Taiwan China Holds Military Drills Around Taiwan in ‘Stern Warning’
(about 7 hours later)
China announced on Saturday that it would conduct three days of military drills around Taiwan, days after the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, met with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, in California. China began three days of military exercises around Taiwan on Saturday in what it called a “stern warning,” after the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, met earlier in the week with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in a show of Taiwanese-U.S. solidarity.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, had condemned the meeting. It is the highest-level government reception a Taiwanese president has received in the United States since the United States established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, and China’s defense and foreign ministries had promised a forceful response. 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, in California on Wednesday.
But the drills announced so far are more limited than those that China held in August, after the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan to show solidarity for the island democracy. Then, Beijing carried out its largest-ever military exercises, sending live missiles into waters around the island and simulating a blockade of it. The 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.
The new round of exercises will take place between Saturday and Monday, according to a statement from Colonel Shi Yi, a spokesman for the Chinese military’s Eastern Theater Command, which encompasses Taiwan. They will include combat readiness patrols and drills in the strait between China and Taiwan, as well as to north, south and east of the island. “This is a stern warning against the collusion and provocations of the ‘Taiwanese independence’ separatist forces and external forces,” Col. Shi Yi said in a statement announcing the sea and air drills. He was speaking on behalf of the Chinese military’s Eastern Theater Command, which oversees the region encompassing Taiwan.
China’s Maritime Safety Agency in Fujian, the province closest to Taiwan, had also on Thursday and Friday announced that it would conduct several days of patrols. 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 Ms. Tsai, who has rejected China’s preconditions for talks, of pursuing independence for Taiwan, and Colonel Shi said the exercises were “necessary to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said in a statement Saturday that it had detected 13 Chinese military aircraft and three navy vessels around Taiwan between 6 a.m. Friday and Saturday, including four that crossed the so-called median line, an informal boundary between Taiwan and the mainland. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said on 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 relatively restrained response, for now, appears to reflect a shift in diplomatic strategy. During Ms. Pelosi’s visit, Beijing — facing pressure domestically because of a slowing economy amid prolonged coronavirus restrictions — had seemed eager to rally nationalist sentiment with a bellicose response. It announced the live-fire drills before Ms. Pelosi had even left Taiwan, and also suspended military and climate talks with the United States. China’s display of military force had echoes of August, when the previous speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taipei and met Ms. Tsai in a show of solidarity. But China’s response this time appeared — initially, at least — to be more limited than the one after Ms. Pelosi’s visit. Last year, Beijing fired missiles into waters around Taiwan and held days of exercises simulating a blockade of the island.
But in recent months, after abandoning Covid controls, the government has tried to repair its image abroad, especially in Europe. President Emmanuel Macron of France met with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, over several days in Beijing and in the southern city of Guangzhou this week. The drills were not announced until after Mr. Macron left the country. “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.
Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting. “It looks like they will not be as intense as last year, but still they’ll be stronger than usual,” he said. “Of course, the possibility of additional actions can’t be excluded, but I’d guess that they will not go beyond this scope.”
Ms. Tsai’s meeting with Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. Tsai and foreign politicians, especially senior American figures.
“The Taiwan issue is the most important, most core, and most sensitive issue in the China-U.S. relationship,” a commentary in the Liberation Army Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese military, said on Saturday. It said that for Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy to “meet in any form or for any excuse amounts to an upgrade in U.S.-Taiwan contacts and is a major political provocation to China.”
But China appears to be trying to calibrate its response to Ms. Tsai’s meetings in the United States with Mr. 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 the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and a former Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, had finished their visits to China. Mr. Ma’s Nationalist Party generally favors closer ties with China.
“I think it’s status quo in terms of what we probably expected,” Representative Ami Bera, Democrat of California, said of China’s actions, speaking in an interview Saturday while visiting Taiwan as part of a congressional delegation.
In responding to Ms. Tsai’s meeting with Mr. 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 Ms. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, experts have said. (After two terms in office, she 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 who studies electoral attitudes in Taiwan.
“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.”
China’s latest drills are also part of its long-term effort to convince Taiwanese people that unification under Beijing is inevitable, and to warn them that steps toward formal independence could lead to war.
The Chinese military Eastern Theater Command said that the exercises would involve frigates, missile-launching boats, fighter jets, bombers and other weaponry. Their focus was to hone skills in “seizing sea, air and information dominance,” the Eastern Theater Command said on Weibo, a Chinese social media service. Its announcement was accompanied by a video, apparently shot earlier and set to stirring music, showing Chinese troops, naval ships and warplanes scrambling into action.
“The newly announced exercises are once again intended to show that the Chinese military can project power around the island of Taiwan,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has monitored China’s response to Ms. Tsai’s trip abroad.
Despite Ms. Tsai’s efforts to limit her public activities in the United States and Washington’s attempts to encourage restraint from China, Mr. Hart said, “Beijing is nevertheless trying to exploit this as an opportunity to punish Taiwan and the United States and to try to shift cross-strait dynamics in its favor.”