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‘Taiwan will not provoke but…’: President Tsai Ing-wen as China fires missiles
Tsai Ing-wen also urged the international community to jointly stop unilateral and irrational military actions.
As China fired ballistic missiles and deployed fighter jets and warships on Thursday, a day after US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a solidarity trip to the self-ruled island, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said it will not provoke conflicts but will firmly defend its sovereignty and national security. She was responding to Chinese military drills near the island.
Tsai also urged the international community to jointly stop unilateral and irrational military actions.
Pelosi was the highest-profile US official to visit Taiwan in years, defying a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory.
In retaliation, China launched a series of exercises in multiple zones around Taiwan, straddling some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and at some points just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the island's shore.
The drills began around 12 noon local time (0400 GMT), and involved a "conventional missile firepower assault" in waters to the east of Taiwan, the Chinese military said.
Taiwan said the Chinese military fired 11 Dongfeng-class ballistic missiles "in several batches" and condemned the exercises as "irrational actions that undermine regional peace".
Taipei did not say where the missiles landed or whether they flew over the island.
Japan, a key US ally, lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing over the exercises, with Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi saying five of the ballistic missiles fired by China were believed to have landed in his country's exclusive economic zone.
Beijing has defended the drills as "necessary and just", pinning the blame for the escalation on the United States and its allies.
"In the face of this blatant provocation, we have to take legitimate and necessary countermeasures to safeguard the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing Thursday.
Military analysts told Beijing's state broadcaster CCTV that the goal was to practice a possible blockade of the island and contain its pro-independence forces.
"The purpose is to show that the PLA is capable of controlling all the exits of the Taiwan Island, which will be a great deterrent to 'Taiwan independence' secessionist forces," Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at China's Naval Research Institute, said.
"The operations are conducted in an unprecedentedly close range to the Taiwan Island," Meng Xiangqing, a military expert, stressed.
"The operations will leave a deterrence effect that is stronger than ever before."
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington had contacted Beijing "at every level of government" in recent days to call for calm and stability.
"I hope very much that Beijing will not manufacture a crisis or seek a pretext to increase its aggressive military activity," Blinken told ministers from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Phnom Penh.
Taiwan's Maritime and Port Bureau has issued warnings to ships to avoid the areas being used for the Chinese drills.
