Chinese forces are conducting military drills as a message to a delegation of prominent Americans visiting Taiwan at the behest of President Joe Biden.
“The signal given by the military drills is that we are determined to stop Taiwan independence, and stop Taiwan from working with the U.S.,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang said Tuesday. “We are doing it with action.”
A group of former U.S. government officials arrived in Taiwan on Wednesday, led by former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a longtime ally of Biden. Chinese Communist Party officials, who claim sovereignty over Taiwan, sortied 25 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone Monday — followed by the launch of a six-day live-fire war-game in the South China Sea, near an island claimed by Taiwan.
“The Chinese side has lodged solemn representations with the US over the high-level government decision to send personnel to visit the Taiwan region,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday, adding that Biden should “refrain from sending any wrong signals to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces to avoid further grave damage to China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
US AND JAPAN WARN CHINA NOT TO ATTACK TAIWAN
Taiwan is the last redoubt of the government defeated in the Chinese Communist revolution. Its location in a chain of islands governed by U.S. allies makes it a “cork” on Beijing’s ability to project military power in the Indo-Pacific, rendering its political status a matter of major significance for both U.S. and Chinese military strategists.
“We’re not looking, as you know, for confrontation with China,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week. “We have … publicly and privately expressed our concerns — our growing concerns about China’s aggression towards Taiwan. China has taken increasingly coercive action to undercut democracy in Taiwan. We’ve seen a concerning increase in PRC military activity in the Taiwan Strait, which we believe is potentially destabilizing.”
Taiwanese officials announced this week that they are renewing their efforts to upgrade a runway in the Pratas Islands, the outlying clutch of territory where China is conducting the live-fire drills. That location has a double significance for territorial disputes because it is not only part of the China-Taiwan controversy, but it also lies in the South China Sea — a vast waterway with multiple overlapping territorial claims, which Beijing has tried to claim, in defiance of neighboring countries and the United States.
“The drills are clearly a declaration of sovereignty, which points to both the claims in the South China Sea as well as to Taiwan,” Hainan University research fellow Kang Lin told the South China Morning Post. “It also acts as a clear warning to foreign countries not to intervene in these two issues.”
Ma, the Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman, blamed the “current complex and severe situation” on Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s “colluding with separatist and external forces to seek independence provocations” — a reference to meetings with U.S. officials, among others.
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“We do not promise to abandon the use of force and retain the option of taking all necessary measures,” Ma said. “We are aimed at the interference of external forces and the very small number of separatists and their separatist activities. We are definitely not aimed at compatriots in Taiwan.”
