05/19/2024

China reportedly escalated military deployments near Taiwan, coming dangerously close to entering Taiwanese airspace as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane nears the contested island.

Chinese warplanes buzzed the unofficial dividing line between Taiwanese and Chinese waters Tuesday, briefly touching it before circling back to base as Taiwanese aircraft stood ready to engage, Reuters reported, citing an anonymous source. Several Chinese warships also passed through waters adjacent to Taiwan on Tuesday morning, coordinating with the aircraft to put pressure on the median line in a “very provocative” fashion.

“The Chinese Communist Party is raising the specter of war and should be punished for doing so…. We need to act in such a way that the CCP sees that its security has been degraded, not improved, because it threatened the Speaker,” Jacqueline Deal, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and president and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

While the warplanes departed, the Chinese ships remain in the area, Reuters reported.

Chinese social media users began posting videos of tanks and troops moving across the southern Chinese city of Xiamen toward the Fujian province coast, which borders the Taiwan Strait, Tuesday. Reuters could not immediately verify the reports.

The website of the government of Taiwan also suffered a brief outage Tuesday due a cyberattack originating from overseas, Reuters reported.

The Taiwanese ministry of defense identified air activity in the strait on Monday and said it will mobilize as needed to address “enemy threats,” Reuters reported.

Chinese coast guard vessels also entered Japan’s territorial waters Monday after a similar movement on July 8, a spokesman for the Japan Coast Guard’s 11th Regional Headquarters told Stars and Stripes.