- A US Navy reconnaissance jet flew over the Taiwan Strait on Monday.
- The US 7th Fleet said in a statement that the P-8A Poseidon flight was conducted in accordance with international law.
- A spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command (PLA) accused Washington of hyping the flight and inflaming tensions.
Despite strong objections from the Chinese military, a US Navy reconnaissance jet flew over the Taiwan Strait on Monday in an attempt to assert the right to operate in international airspace.
The US 7th Fleet said in a statement Monday that the P-8A Poseidon flight over the waterway separating China and the self-ruled island of Taiwan was conducted in accordance with international law, demonstrating “the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
However, Army Senior Col. Shi Yi, a spokesman for China’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theater Command, accused Washington of exaggerating the flight and inflaming tensions.
But a spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Army Senior Col. Shi Yi, accused Washington of hyping the flight and inflaming tensions.
The US flight “has deliberately disrupted the regional situation and jeopardized the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Shi said in a report.
That allegation was amplified in Chinese state media, with a story in the nationalist state-run tabloid alleging that the US Navy antisubmarine warfare and surveillance jet was shot down. “just another provocation aimed at stirring up troubles.”
According to the US 7th Fleet statement, the US will continue to “fly, sail, and operate anywhere international law allows including within the Taiwan Strait.”
Despite never having controlled Taiwan, a democratically governed island of 24 million people, the Chinese Communist Party claims it as part of its sovereign territory.
Beijing maintains military pressure on the island by sending military aircraft and ships into the Taiwan Strait on a daily basis.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that it had spotted 14 PLA aircraft and three naval vessels around the island, including four aircraft that crossed the strait’s median line, which had served as a rarely breached informal demarcation line between the two sides for decades but is now routinely ignored by Beijing.
The PLA’s deployments on Tuesday increased from four aircraft and three ships spotted by Taiwan on Monday, with none crossing the median line.
The US P-8A flight on Monday was the second in less than a week to pique the PLA’s interest.
On Friday, a US Poseidon carrying a CNN crew was intercepted over the South China Sea near the Paracel Islands, a chain of disputed coral atolls where Beijing has built military installations despite competing claims from Vietnam and Taiwan.
The CNN crew filmed the intercept after a PLA airfield in the Paracels, also known as the Xisha Islands in China, warned the US plane to avoid what it claimed was Chinese airspace around the islands.
The PLA handled the encounter with the US aircraft professionally. However, the presence of the “US spy plane that conducted a close-in reconnaissance on China at China’s doorstep” According to the report, this demonstrates that Washington, not Beijing, is the “aggressor” in the region.
“The US military frequently sends aircraft and vessels to the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Taiwan Straits for close-in reconnaissance operations and provocative transits, although China is thousands of kilometers away from the US,” it said.
US general: PLA is ‘getting ready for something’
In a related development, the general in charge of the US Army in the Pacific said Monday that the PLA is on a “historical trajectory” as it expands its forces.
“The military arm that they have created, it’s extraordinary,” General Charles Flynn stated this at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
“They are rehearsing, they are practicing, they are experimenting, and they are preparing those forces for something,” Flynn said. “But you don’t build up that kind of arsenal to just defend and protect. You are probably building that for other purposes.”
At the same event, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth stated that, while a PLA amphibious invasion of Taiwan is not imminent, “we have to obviously prepare … to fight and win that war.”
“I think the best way we avoid fighting that war is by showing the (People’s Republic of China) and countries in the region that we can actually win that war,” she stated.
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