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TAIPEI: Taiwan’s air force scrambled planes for the second day in a row on Saturday as several Chinese planes approached the island and crossed the sensitive middle line of the Taiwan Strait, and the island government urged Beijing to “retreat from the edge.” .
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said 19 Chinese aircraft were involved, one more than the previous day, some crossed the middle line of the Taiwan Strait and others flew into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone off the southwest coast.
He said China, which claims that democratic Taiwan is its own territory, sent 12 J-16 fighters, two J-10 fighters, two J-11 fighters, two H-6 bombers and one Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft.
According to a map provided by the ministry, none approached the mainland of Taiwan or flew over it.
“ROCAF encrypted the fighters and deployed an air defense missile system to monitor activities,” the ministry said in a tweet, referring to the ROC Air Force, the formal name for the Taiwan air force.
Taiwan has complained of repeated incidents of Chinese aircraft near the island this year, and has had to regularly move its F-16s and other aircraft to intercept them.
China announced on Friday, at a press conference in Beijing on China’s peacekeeping efforts at the UN, mock combat near the Taiwan Strait and denounced what it called collusion between the island and the United States.
US Deputy Secretary for Economic Affairs Keith Krach arrived in Taipei on Thursday for a three-day visit, the highest-ranking State Department official to come to Taiwan in four decades, enraging China.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense, in a separate statement, said that China was carrying out provocative activities, seriously damaging peace and stability.
“The Defense Ministry severely condemns this and calls on the authorities of the continent to control themselves and to withdraw from the limit.”
China’s widely read state-backed tabloid Global Times, published by the official People’s Daily of the ruling Communist Party, said in an editorial on Saturday that Friday’s drills were a test to take over Taiwan.
“The United States and Taiwan must not misjudge the situation or believe that the exercise is a hoax. If they continue to provoke, a war will inevitably break out, ”she said.
Life has continued normally in Taiwan with no signs of panic. The island has long been used to living with Chinese threats.
The people of Taiwan have shown no interest in being ruled by autocratic China, and last year re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen in what was largely a platform of resistance to Beijing.
The latest Chinese flights occurred on the same day that Taiwan held a memorial service for former President Lee Teng-hui, nicknamed “Mr. Democracy” for ending the autocratic rule in favor of free elections and defending Taiwan’s separate identity from China.
Lee, who died in July, became Taiwan’s first democratically elected president in March 1996 after eight months of intimidating war games and missile tests by China in waters around the island.
Those events brought China and Taiwan to the brink of conflict, prompting the United States to send an aircraft carrier task force to the area in a warning to the Beijing government.
Taiwan and China last fought on a large scale in 1958, when Chinese forces carried out more than a month of bombardment of the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen and Matsu Islands, including naval and air battles.
