Nearly 90 Chinese ships have been deployed near Taiwan, the largest naval force in the region in decades, Taiwan's defense ministry said. China did not officially announce any maneuvers in this place, but experts expected them as a reaction to the recent foreign trips of the Taiwanese president.
The number of Chinese ships, as well as, among others, coast guard units deployed near Taiwan is the largest since the Chinese army's major maneuvers in 1996, warned Sun Li-fang, spokesman for the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense on Tuesday. He said that Chinese units are located along the so-called the first island chain, i.e. the line of islands stretching from the north Japan through Taiwan to Philippineswhich separates China from the Pacific.
Almost 90 ships off the coast
As Sun Li-fang reported, there are more Chinese ships, including: than during the Chinese People's Liberation Army exercises organized in 2022 in response to the visit of the then Speaker of the House of Representatives USA Nancy Pelosi in Taipei. – The current scale (of these exercises) is the largest compared to the previous four (large-scale maneuvers) – he admitted. “Regardless of whether (Beijing) announced these exercises or not, it poses a huge threat to us,” he added. The Chinese side has not yet confirmed plans to launch further maneuvers in the region.
A senior Taiwanese security official told AFP on Tuesday that there were “almost 90” Chinese vessels currently in the waters of the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. These forces are larger than the entire fleets of most countries in the world, including: Great Britain or German.
Chinese frigates Daqing and Yancheng and the American missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill, 2016dvidshub – Craig Rodarde
Taiwan's Ministry of Defense said in a Tuesday morning report that over the past 24 hours (until 11 p.m. on Monday in Poland) it also detected 47 Chinese planes and 12 ships near the main island of Taiwan, which indicates China's greatest military activity in two months.
China and Taiwan
Speculation about Beijing's intentions to stage large drills near Taiwan has swirled since last week, when Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te made his first foreign trip to three Pacific island nations that maintain diplomatic relations with Taipei. Lai also spent a short time on the American island of Guam and Hawaii, which was criticized by China.
The communist authorities in Beijing maintain that Taiwan is an “inseparable” part of China, and consider Lai a “separatist”. President Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party, from which he comes, have repeatedly emphasized that Taiwan and China are “not subordinated to each other” and only the Taiwanese can decide about the country's future. In a study by the Taiwanese think tank IPST published at the end of November, 92 percent Taiwanese said they believed that Taiwan was already an independent country, and 77.5 percent said that Taiwan did not belong to China.
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Tension around TaiwanPAP/REUTERS/Adam Ziemienowicz
Main photo source: dvidshub – Craig Rodarde