Tokyo yesterday protested to Beijing after Chinese Coast Guard vessels sailed into territorial waters surrounding disputed islands in the East China Sea, Japan said.
Four Chinese vessels entered the waters around the Japanese-controlled Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — known as the Senkakus in Japan — at about 10am, the Japan Coast Guard said, adding that the vessels left the waters within one hour.
The two countries are locked in a long-running dispute over the uninhabited islets, which Taiwan also claims.
Tokyo has lodged at least 32 protests through diplomatic channels since Aug. 5 over what it said have been about 30 intrusions by Chinese vessels in the territorial waters.
Japan’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau Director-General Kenji Kanasugi yesterday issued a protest to the Chinese embassy in Tokyo, saying that the ships’ “incursion” violated Japan’s sovereignty, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
“Despite Japan’s repeated strong protests, the Chinese side has continued to take unilateral actions that raise tensions on the ground, and that is absolutely unacceptable,” the statement added.
China is also involved in maritime disputes in the South China Sea with countries including the Philippines, but a UN-backed tribunal has ruled that Beijing’s claims were invalid.
In related news, Chinese aircraft and ships held war games in the Sea of Japan last week, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense said, during which Beijing displayed its latest-generation frigate.
The ministry said in a statement on its Web site late on Saturday that the long-range exercises staged on Friday pitted a red army against a blue one in a simulated bomber attack on a naval task force.
It quoted the commander of an unidentified flight wing under China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy’s East Sea Fleet, Zhang Wenzhong, as saying the planes found, identified and struck their targets in a “radically short time.”
The statement made no mention of what sort of conflict the exercise was intended as a response to, prospective foes or why the Sea of Japan was chosen as the location of the drills.
The ministry said the main ships involved in the exercise were the Jingzhou, a latest-generation type 054A class stealth frigate of which China is planning to deploy more than two dozen, and the type 052C destroyer Xi’an.
The ministry said aircraft were guided to their targets with the aid of early warning planes.
Other types of aircraft involved were not identified, although China has been touting the capabilities of its latest-generation long-range H-6K strategic bomber equipped with the DH-20 land-attack cruise missile, giving it the ability to hit targets as far away as Australia.
Only Russia and the US are currently able to launch cruise missiles from the air.
Additional reporting by AP
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has