China’s armed forces have organized escorts for US and Canadian warships in the Taiwan Strait, Shi Yi, spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Combat Command, said on Thursday.
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Shi Yi reported that on November 1, the American destroyer USS Rafael Peralta and the Canadian frigate HMCS Ottawa passed through the Taiwan Strait.
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“The PLA Eastern Combat Command Zone has organized naval and air forces to escort and monitor (ships) along the entire route in accordance with the law and regulations,” Shi Yi said in a statement published on the official account of the Eastern Combat Command Zone PLA on the WeChat social network.
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He stressed that the troops of the PLA Eastern Combat Command Zone are always on high alert, resolutely defending national sovereignty and security, as well as regional peace and stability.
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The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after the visit of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to the island in early August last year. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing in this step US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
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Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
