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.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) is to launch a new program to encourage international students to stay in Taiwan and explore job opportunities here after graduation, Deputy Minister of Education Yeh Ping-cheng (葉丙成) said on Friday. The government would provide full scholarships for international students to further their studies for two years in Taiwan, so those who want to pursue a master’s degree can consider applying for the program, he said. The fields included are science, technology, engineering, mathematics, semiconductors and finance, Yeh added. The program, called “Intense 2+2,” would also assist international students who completed the two years of further studies in
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
Taiwan will now have four additional national holidays after the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment today, which also made Labor Day a national holiday for all sectors. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their majority in the Legislative Yuan to pass the amendment to the Act on Implementing Memorial Days and State Holidays (紀念日及節日實施辦法), which the parties jointly proposed, in its third and final reading today. The legislature passed the bill to amend the act, which is currently enforced administratively, raising it to the legal level. The new legislation recognizes Confucius’ birthday on Sept. 28, the
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
RSS