Beijing does not tolerate foreign forces intervening in issues involving Taiwan and has to make strong responses to such acts of “collusion,” the Chinese government said yesterday after Taipei reported the largest incursion to date of Chinese aircraft.
Twenty-eight Chinese aircraft, including fighters and nuclear-capable bombers, entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Tuesday, the government said.
The incident came after G7 leaders on Sunday issued a joint statement scolding China for a series of issues, and underscored the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, comments China condemned as “slander.”
Asked at a news conference whether the military activity was related to the G7 statement, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) said it was the Taiwanese government that was to blame for tensions.
Beijing believes that Taipei is working with foreign nations to seek formal independence.
“We will never tolerate attempts to seek independence or wanton intervention in the Taiwan issue by foreign forces, so we need to make a strong response to these acts of collusion,” Ma said.
Taipei has complained of repeated missions by Chinese aircraft near Taiwan, concentrated in the southwest of its air defense zone near the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島).
However, this time not only did the Chinese aircraft fly in an area close to the Pratas Islands, but the bombers and some of the fighters flew around the southern part of Taiwan, the Ministry of National Defense said.
The flyby happened on the same day that the US Navy said a carrier group led by the USS Ronald Reagan had entered the disputed South China Sea.
“The Ronald Reagan Strike group did not interact with any Chinese military aircraft,” Carrier Strike Group 5 spokesperson Lieutenant Commander Joe Keiley said in an e-mailed statement responding to questions on whether the Chinese aircraft had approached the group. “During the strike group’s South China Sea operations, all communications between ships and aircraft have been consistent with international norms and have not impacted our operations.”
A senior official familiar with Taiwan’s security planning said that officials believe China was sending a message to the US as the carrier group sailed through the Bashi Channel.
“It’s strategic intimidation of the US military. They wanted the United States to notice their capability and for them to restrain their behavior,” the source said.
Taiwan needs in particular to pay attention to China’s military starting conducting drills in the southeastern ADIZ, the source added.
This “to a certain degree was targeting our deployments in the east and increasing air defense pressure around our ADIZ,” the source said.
The east coast is home to two major air bases with hangars dug out of the side of mountains to provide protection in the event of a Chinese assault.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater