Chinese Activity Around Taiwan Intensifies

The skies around Taiwan have seen an uptick in Chinese air force activity just days before the inauguration of the self-ruled island's next president.

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said that as of 6 a.m. Wednesday, it had detected 45 People's Liberation Army aircraft operating in the area. Twenty-six flew across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, a demarcation that China until recent years largely respected, and into Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ). Six Chinese warships were also observed nearby but beyond Taiwan's territorial waters.

An ADIZ is an area where passing foreign aircraft are required to identify themselves. It differs from territorial airspace in that failure to comply is not considered a violation under international law.

Wednesday saw more Chinese activity than Tuesday, when 33 aircraft, including fighter jets, anti-submarine warfare planes and drones, buzzed the strait, with 25 entering the air defense zone. Tuesday represented a marked increase from the pair of Chinese planes reported on Monday.

Taiwan's defense authorities said they had "monitored the situation," dispatched combat air patrol planes and navy ships, and tracked the Chinese assets with coastal missile systems.

Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry via written request for comment.

Taipei does not generally view Chinese warplane sorties as an immediate national security threat until they cross the median line. Taiwan defense chief Chiu Kuo-cheng reiterated in March that his forces would be permitted to open fire in the event a Chinese aircraft entered territorial airspace, which extends 12 nautical miles from the coast.

"Very much above average," Brent Sadler, senior research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Heritage Foundation, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in reference to the number of Chinese sorties.

China dropped its unspoken policy of keeping to its side of Taiwan Strait in September 2020 following visits to Taiwan by high-ranking Trump administration Cabinet officials. More than 5,000 Chinese sorties into Taiwan's ADIZ have taken place since then.

China claims democratic Taiwan as its own, though the Chinese Communist Party government in Beijing has never ruled there, and Beijing frequently protests visits by foreign officials as violations of its sovereignty.

Beijing has also dispatched higher-than-usual numbers of warplanes into the Taiwan Strait to signal its displeasure.

Sadler pointed out in his post that some of the largest spikes were in response to then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial delegation to Taipei in August 2022, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy's meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen during her U.S. visit in April of last year, and Taiwan's presidential election on January 13.

The winner of that election, current Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Beijing-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party, will be inaugurated on Monday.