All of the Chinese balloons that have been detected in Taiwan’s airspace were weather balloons and did not pose a security threat that justified shooting them down, the military said yesterday.
The Financial Times on Monday reported that dozens of Chinese military balloons have been spotted flying in Taiwanese airspace in the past few years.
“They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago,” an unnamed senior Taiwanese official was quoted as saying.
Photo: Reuters
Similar incursions happen once a month on average, another unnamed official was cited as saying by the Financial Times.
Major General Huang Wen-chi (黃文?), who is with the Office of Deputy Chief of the General Staff on Intelligence, told a news conference yesterday that the Ministry of National Defense had no comment on the report.
The military would not make public the exact number of such incursions detected “to avoid giving away the sources of our intelligence gathering,” Huang said.
The number of detected balloons from China “are in accordance with the number of weather balloons it sends each year,” he said, implying that all of the balloons were likely for meteorological purposes.
Asked if the military had shot down any Chinese balloons, Huang said that the military has so far not found any of them to pose a serious threat to the degree that they needed to be destroyed.
However, the military would take such action if it found that a balloon was a major threat to Taiwan’s security, he added.
Previously, the ministry had only confirmed one instance of a flyover by Chinese balloons, when four batches flew over northern Taiwan in February last year.
Chinese balloon programs have drawn global attention after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was spotted in US airspace and shot down by the US on Feb. 4.
Taiwan has been circumspect about previous sightings of Chinese balloons.
On Feb. 27 last year, it said that prior to that day, there had been four sightings of balloons over Keelung, Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Taichung, and that they were likely for meteorological or scientific research purposes.
Meanwhile, China yesterday said that high-altitude balloons released by the US since May last year had entered its airspace.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said that US balloons “flew around the world and illegally entered the airspaces of China and other relevant countries at least 10 times.”
“The United States should conduct a thorough investigation and give China an explanation,” he said.
The US denied the allegation.
Separately, the US military on Monday said it had recovered electronics from the suspected Chinese spy balloon downed by a US fighter jet off South Carolina’s coast, including key sensors presumably used for intelligence gathering.
“Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified, as well as large sections of the structure,” the US military’s Northern Command said in a statement.
The balloon led to the US military to scour the skies for other objects that were not being captured by radar, leading to an unprecedented three shootdowns from Friday to Sunday.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Monday downplayed the risks posed by the objects.
“I want to reassure Americans that these objects do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground,” Austin said, speaking to reporters as he landed in Brussels for a NATO gathering. “They do, however, present a risk to civil aviation and potentially an intelligence collection threat.”
US officials have declined to connect the incidents, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday said without elaborating that the four aerial objects shot down were somehow connected.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS