Two Chinese military ships cruised near Taiwan this week on apparent spy missions, a Taiwanese newspaper and an official said yesterday.
The timing of the alleged spy missions was highly sensitive because Taiwan has been conducting missile tests and anti-submarine exercises near where the vessels appeared, the China Times reported in a front-page story.
Late yesterday, the head of the National Security Council, Kang Ning-hsiang (
The navy said that a 3,000-tonne Chinese naval ice-breaking ship, the Haibing AZB723, sailed within 94km of Taiwan's southern port of Kaohsiung at 2pm on Sunday.
Taiwanese navy ships came within 5.6km of the vessel before it left Taiwanese waters, the report said.
The second ship, the Xiangyanghong No. 9, was seen on Tuesday between 73 and 91km off Taiwan's eastern coast, the report said. The survey ship was sailing south along Taiwan's coast.
Kang said it was normal for Chinese spy ships to sail near Taiwan while the island conducts military exercises.
He said that the Haibing AZB723 was detected by Taiwan's sea, air and land radar systems. The navy sent Lafayette frigates to monitor the ship, he said.
``The [Chinese ship] had no missiles, so it wasn't all that dangerous, but we still had to watch it,'' he said.
The navy and the Coast Guard Administration scrambled to send a Lafayette-class frigate and a patrol boat to keep watch on the armed Chinese vessel, which sailed around there until Tuesday.
The coast guard said it was also watching the other Chinese surveillance ship, sailing off the northeast coast of Taiwan.
"Obviously they were there to collect military-related information particularly when some programs of the Han Kuang exercise were being held in the two areas," Kang said.
Kang did not provide details about the largest annual drills yet, but the operations of the two Chinese ships came as the Taiwanese military were conducting anti-submarine and live-fire missile exercises in the areas.
The Taiwanese kept a close but cautious eye on the ships, fearing an unexpected clash could lead to military conflict between Taiwan and China, which have been foes since their split in 1949 at the end of the civil war.
Kang called for the establishment of a "mutual trust" military mechanism to avoid unexpected clashes between the two nations, which could spell disaster.
A Chinese surveillance ship HaiYang 4 was last found southeast of the island on April 9.
Taipei protested to Beijing in November after it found a similar Chinese surveillance ship, indentified as Xiangyanghong 14, intruding on Taiwan's turf.
Relations between Taiwan and China are still hostile despite the start of civil contacts in 1987.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
RSS