Taiwan is next year to begin deploying drone defense systems on its outlying islands, the Ministry of National Defense said, after footage emerged of soldiers throwing stones at a Chinese drone that buzzed a guard post near China’s coast.
Taiwan has complained of repeated Chinese drone incursions near its outlying islands as part of Chinese military drills after US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei early this month.
The brief video clip, circulated first on Chinese social media before being picked up by Taiwanese media, shows two soldiers throwing stones at a drone that got near their guard post.
In a statement on Wednesday, the defense command in Kinmen County said the incident occurred on Tuesday last week on Erdan Islet (二膽), and confirmed the soldiers had thrown stones to see off what it called a civilian drone.
The ministry said in a separate statement that starting next year, it would deploy anti-drone systems, which would first be placed on outlying islands.
“Officers and soldiers at all levels will continue to implement vigilance in accordance with the principle of not escalating conflicts or causing disputes,” it said.
China has not commented on the footage, which has received millions of views on Chinese social media with users making fun of it.
It has also triggered heated discussion in Taiwan, with some social media users calling the incident a “humiliation” for the armed forces and urging the defense ministry to step up its countermeasures to the increasingly frequent drone incursions.
The Kinmen defense command said the footage was another example of China’s “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan and an attempt to “denigrate” its armed forces.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) described the incident as “very serious” and questioned why the ministry did not respond to the incursion.
“The drone was flying on top of our soldiers on guard, but there’s zero response,” he said. “If you just let them come and go freely, this was negligence of duty.”
Taiwan has controlled Kinmen, along with Lienchiang County further up China’s coast, since 1949, when the government, at the time led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), fled to Taipei after losing a civil war with Chinese Communist Party troops led by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and retained the islands as bridgeheads to “retake China.”
At its closest point, the Chinese coast is only a few hundred meters from Kinmen.
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