China intends to flout established flight routes and treat airspace over the Taiwan Strait as its own, a researcher said on Monday, after a Chinese civilian aircraft flew over Kinmen County last month.
China Eastern Airlines Flight MU-505 from Shanghai to Hong Kong on April 29 deviated from flight route M503 — which follows China’s coastline and then travels through international waters in the Taiwan Strait — and crossed directly over Kinmen County toward China.
The Chinese Civil Aviation Administration said the flight deviated to avoid inclement weather.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
However, the flight had already passed the periphery of the thunderstorm when it deviated toward Kinmen, National Defense University researcher Ma Chen-kun (馬振坤) said, adding that Chinese air traffic control instructed the flight to make the deviation.
Ma made the remarks on Monday at a seminar discussing the outcome of this year’s G7 summit held from Friday to Sunday in Hiroshima.
Under a cross-strait agreement, in the event of inclement weather flights on route M503 normally redirect toward airspace over China before reaching Kinmen, and do not return to the normal flight path until they reach the boundary between China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces, roughly 200km south of Kinmen, he said.
Beijing has been normalizing military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, and is likely to find excuses to increase inspections of Taiwanese vessels in a bid to expand its maritime jurisdiction, he said.
“This is all part of the gray zone tactics that China has been employing in recent years, which are aimed at reducing the vigilance of Taiwan’s military, and of US forces stationed in Okinawa,” said Kuo Yu-jen (郭育仁), a professor at National Sun Yat-sen University’s Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies.
“You can see this in the way China has been blurring the lines between military exercises and mobilization,” Kuo said.
The approach would erode the early warning window ahead of a full-scale Chinese assault on Taiwan, and local forces could find themselves overwhelmed in the event of a surprise attack, he said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS