Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has arrived in Taiwan along with a Congressional delegation as part of a scheduled trip through Asia. Despite earlier concerns, China's People's Liberation Army does not appear to have tried to directly intervene to block Pelosi's flight.
The military response to Pelosi's trip came swiftly. The People’s Liberation Army — announcing that exercises were to begin Tuesday night — departed from an earlier Chinese official statement declaring military drills would take place between Thursday and Sunday.
Just before her plane arrived, the People’s Liberation Army said it’d scrambled an unspecified number of Su-35 warplanes crossing the Taiwan Strait — which is on the other side of Taiwan from which Pelosi’s flight came. Taiwan’s defense ministry, however, dismissed that claim as “fake news.”
Chinese authorities have now announced plans for a series of highly provocative "targeted military operations," which state media outlets say will be ostensible exercises involving the live-firing of missiles and other weapons in six different areas around the self-governing island.
The show of force from Beijing is an unambiguous signal to the international community of how easily China could impose an effective trade stranglehold round the democratic island, which is a crucial to global supply chains because of its advanced microchip production.
Taiwanese authorities say that 21 Chinese military aircraft subsequently entered the southern end of the island's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).
This force included eight J-11 and 10 J-16 fighter jets, both derived from the Soviet Su-27 Flanker design, as well as a KJ-500 airborne early warning and control plane, a Y-9 electronic warfare aircraft, and a Y-8 electronic intelligence platform, according to the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense.
In response, the Taiwanese military issued radio warnings and deployed air defense missile systems to monitor the activities, it added.
China frequently sends warplanes into Taiwan's self-declared ADIZ. The highest number of incursions ever recorded was on October 4 last year, when 56 military planes flew into the area on the same day.
An ADIZ is unilaterally imposed and distinct from sovereign airspace, which is defined under international law as extending 12 nautical miles from a territory's shoreline.
While the bulk of the ADIZ consists of international airspace, the regime in Beijing has increasingly used flights like this to pressure its counterparts in Taipei and otherwise express its displeasure with events concerning the island in the past few years.
State media outlets have described these planned activities as live-fire exercises, but they could well reflect existing PLA concepts of operation for an actual intervention against Taiwan.
Purported drills are precisely the kind of thing one might expect to see occur repeatedly in the lead up to a real invasion. Russia, for instance, conducted a number of large-scale exercises in areas near Ukraine prior to invading that country, and had also claimed its buildup for that operation was another series of drills.
Experts and observers have noted that some of the areas in question overlap with places where Chinese forces carried out exercises in 1996 as part of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, a seminal moment in post-Cold War U.S.-Chinese relations.
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