Taiwan deploys planes and ships in response to China’s military exercises

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that the island’s military has deployed aircraft and ships and deployed land-based missile systems to monitor the situation as China conducts large-scale military exercises in zones around the island.

Several Chinese ships and aircraft crossed the midline of the Taiwan Strait on Friday morning, said the ministry, which described China’s military activities as highly provocative.

Taiwan’s armed forces will prepare combat readiness but do not seek war, the Defense Ministry added.

China said it fired missiles at the island of Taiwan for the first time on Friday, raising tensions in the region. The Chinese military had already fired missiles into the waters around Taiwan – a democratic island of 24 million people that the Chinese Communist Party considers part of its territory – on Thursday (4).

A Chinese military expert confirmed on state broadcaster CCTV that conventional missiles had flown over Taiwan’s main island, including airspace covered by Taiwanese defense missiles.

“We hit targets under observation of the US Aegis combat system, which means that the Chinese military has solved the difficulties of hitting long-range targets in the waters,” said Major General Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at Defense University. National. in Beijing.

In a statement, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the missiles had traveled above the atmosphere and therefore posed no risk to the island.

Authorities did not trigger air strike warnings because they predicted the missiles would land in waters east of Taiwan, the ministry said. The ministry added that it would not release more information about the projectiles’ trajectory to protect its intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Five ballistic missiles are believed to have landed in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone, including four that would have flown over Taiwan, Japan’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday.