In a bid to further intimidate Taiwan, China’s communist government has used U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to the island to “permanently alter” the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, according to U.S. officials.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby revealed that throughout the entire Pelosi-Taiwan saga, the U.S. government has seen “a clear attempt by the Chinese to permanently alter the status quo in and around Taiwan” and efforts to “set a new normal for their activities and behaviors, be that behavior crossing over the medium line with air and maritime assets or in this case, overflight by unmanned aerial systems.”
The U.S. has been “very clear publicly that changing the status quo is unacceptable” and “we’re not going to recognize it” or “abide by it,” Kirby said.
Following Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan with a delegation of U.S. congressional members last month, China has significantly ramped up its military activity in the region. In addition to blacklisting major Taiwanese food exporters, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted a series of live-fire military drills around Taiwan, with PLA forces sending “at least 11 missiles into the seas north, south and east of Taiwan” and “dozens of warships and fighter jets” into the Taiwan Strait.
Lasting nearly a week, the exercises were seemingly only a starting point for China’s communist government, which through a military official claimed that the country would “[c]ontinue to carry out military training for war preparedness” and “organise normalised combat-readiness security patrol in the Taiwan Strait.”
While previously limiting the majority of its military activity in the region to Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, China has begun to normalize crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait since Pelosi’s visit. Developed in 1954 “at the height of Cold War hostility between Communist China and U.S.-backed Taiwan,” the imaginary line running through the middle of the Taiwan Strait has acted as of a sort-of buffer zone between the two nations. Although China has never officially recognized the line, “the People’s Liberation Army [has] largely respected it” until now.
On Wednesday, for instance, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported “7 PLAN vessels and 62 PLA aircraft” in the region, with Taiwanese military forces responding to the incursions “with aircraft in [combat air patrols], naval vessels, and land-based missile systems.”
The routine intrusion came a day after Taiwanese military personnel fired at Chinese surveillance drones for entering restricted airspace.
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Source: The Federalist
