Taiwan’s defense minister said that on Wednesday, 30 Chinese military planes were seen flying around the island.
China’s air force and navy held another large-scale drill with fighters, bombers, and warships to the south and southwest of Taiwan on Tuesday, according to the island’s defense minister. This comes as Beijing keeps up its military pressure on Taipei.
China thinks of democratically run Taiwan as its own land, so it has been sending warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) a lot over the past three years to try to get the island to accept Chinese authority.
China held war games around Taiwan in August and April of last year. Since August, China has also flown military planes over the middle line of the Taiwan Strait, which used to be an unofficial border between the two countries.
In a statement released Wednesday, Taiwan’s defense ministry said that in the past 24 hours, it had seen 32 Chinese air force planes, including fighter jets, helicopters, and early warning aircraft, enter the island’s ADIZ.
A map given by the ministry shows that four H-6 bombers that could carry nuclear weapons flew to the south of Taiwan and into the Pacific before heading back to China.
Late on Tuesday, the ministry said that four Chinese warships were doing “combat readiness patrols” and that Chinese air force planes were working with Chinese ships to train together to the south of Taiwan.
The ministry also said that Taiwan sent its own planes and ships to watch what the Chinese were doing. The ADIZ is a larger area that Taiwan watches and patrols to give its forces more time to react to threats.
China hasn’t said anything about these or other tests that Taiwan has reported in the last month or so.
Last month, Taiwan said that eight Chinese warplanes crossed the middle line and came close to the island’s contiguous zone, which is 24 nautical miles (44 km) off its coast.
Taiwan says that 24 nautical miles from its coast is the limit of its continuous zone. Its national air space starts 12 nautical miles from its coast, but the government hasn’t heard of any Chinese planes flying into either the contiguous zone or Taiwan’s air space.
China says that it owns Taiwan, but Taiwan’s government says that only the people of the island can decide the island’s future.
