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China has stepped up its military posture around Taiwan over the past week, a trend that is expected to fuel growing concerns that Beijing could come close to attacking the island.
Taiwan and Japan reported raids into their respective air defense identification zones on Monday, the first simultaneous announcement from Taipei and Tokyo.
Taiwan said that ten Chinese military aircraft, including fighters and an anti-submarine warplane, had flown to its ADIZ, while Japan registered one ASW aircraft within its area east of Taiwan.
The parallel maneuvers followed the largest incursion in history into Taiwan’s air defense zone last Friday, when 20 Chinese aircraft, including bombers and fighters, entered the area.
The raids came as Washington began to prepare for the growing risk of a war over Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of its sovereign territory. Senior US officials fear that China is flirting with the idea of taking control of Taiwan, a scenario that would almost certainly drag down Washington and some of its allies.
Monday’s raids also followed the arrival in Taiwan of the U.S. ambassador to Palau, along with the president of the Pacific island nation. Palau is one of 15 countries that have diplomatic relations with Taipei rather than Beijing, and the visit was an unusually bold move compared to the restraint Washington has long practiced regarding sending its diplomats to Taiwan.
Surangel Whipps, president of Pulau, which is one of 15 countries that maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, traveled to Taipei last week with the US ambassador to his country. The United States considered the joint visit a bold move © AFP via Getty Images
Friday’s maneuvers came after the United States and Taiwan announced an agreement under which their coastguards would cooperate.
Some experts interpreted the Chinese army’s movements as gradual advance, but agreed that the maneuvers also featured new patterns of behavior.
The People’s Liberation Army has made more regular forays into the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defense zone, where the Taiwan Strait meets the Bashi Canal, since last summer. This is a crucial corridor for the Chinese military into the open waters and airspace of the western Pacific.
The territory would be essential for submarine warfare in any conflict over Taiwan, which explains why anti-submarine warfare planes have been involved in most of the almost daily raids. But while the sorties generally consisted of short, straight flights in and out of the ADIZ, the ASW jets flew over the southern tip of Taiwan into the western Pacific and returned over the past week.
“These last [incursions] it is more about political messages than military operational importance, “said Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, former chief of the general staff of the Taiwanese armed forces. “Flying around Taiwan is not a breakthrough for them. They operated circular flights with H6 bombers when I was in office. ”
“I think this time, they didn’t have enough time to prepare,” Lee added. “So to express their determination towards the US, they flew into the western Pacific, but they didn’t go full circle.”
However, some analysts saw the latest moves as an escalation.
“The Y-8 and Y-9 jets have not done this before,” said Su Tzu-yun, an analyst at the National Defense and Security Research Institute, an think tank backed by the Taiwan Defense Ministry, referring to the ASW flights. “We are going to see more of that as they begin to expand the scope of their regular operations from southwest Taiwan to the southeast.”
Japan’s reported raid also followed an unprecedented approach. A patrol plane and a surveillance plane flew northward off the east coast of Taiwan before turning around and leaving Japan’s ADIZ via the Miyako Strait, Tokyo said.
The Miyako Islands, a small archipelago between Okinawa and Taiwan, have been a hotspot for Chinese air force maneuvers in recent years because the Strait, like the Bashi Channel, is one of the main air and maritime corridors. from the PLA to the open Pacific. Four of the five Chinese air raids reported by Japan in the past year have occurred in this area.
In previous maneuvers, Chinese planes flew only relatively short sorties to the southeast of the Miyako Islands before returning. Monday’s flights marked the first time they have flown this close to the east coast of Taiwan, where the largest reinforced shelters to protect military aircraft from air and missile strikes are located on the side of a mountain in the city of Hualien.
“With its regular operations in the southwest corner of Taiwan ADIZ, the PLA has already changed the status quo and claimed that ‘This is my backyard.’ They have even included this area in their annual training plan, ”Lee said.
People familiar with Taipei’s military strategy said that if the PLA expanded a regular presence to the airspace east of Taiwan, it would undermine the island’s security in a much more drastic way.
