Taiwan’s armed forces have spotted 41 aircraft and seven ships of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) near the island over the past 24 hours, the Taiwanese defense ministry said in a statement.
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“The activity of 41 aircraft and seven ships of the PLA was recorded until 6.00 am today,” the department said in a message on the social network X.
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According to the ministry, 32 PLA aircraft crossed the so-called “median line” of the Taiwan Strait and entered the island’s air defense identification zone.
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Earlier, Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun said that China is very well prepared for any extreme scenarios of “Taiwan independence” and is capable of coping with armed groups advocating the “independence” of the island. He compared the separatists to “a praying mantis trying to stop a chariot with its paws.”
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The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit as US support for Taiwanese separatism and held large-scale military exercises.
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Official relations between the central government of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, 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.
