China responded to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen by conducting three days of aggressive military drills off the coast of Taiwan over the weekend.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that China’s response to the McCarthy-Tsai meeting at the Reagan Library in California on Wednesday was initially more “muted” than its hysterical tantrum after McCarthy’s predecessor Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited Taiwan in August.
That changed on Saturday, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began three days of “combat readiness” exercises around Taiwan billed as a “stern warning” to “Taiwan secessionist forces and foreign forces.”
According to the Taiwanese Defense Ministry, Chinese warplanes flew 70 sorties during a ten-hour period on Sunday, including heavy nuclear-capable bombers.
Half of those flights passed over the “median line” in the Strait of Taiwan, which was long viewed as an unofficial border between Chinese and Taiwanese airspace that both sides respected to avoid military escalation. Communist China said it would no longer respect the median line in 2020 and began aggressively pushing over it with large numbers of warplanes after Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
China’s state-run Global Times extensively detailed the “Joint Sword” exercises on Sunday, portraying them as a “firm response” to Tsai’s visit to California.
PLA spokesmen said China’s aircraft carrier Shandong and its support group were part of the exercises, which “gathered all military services and branches with complete combat elements, with all of them equipped with live munitions and radars turned on.”
