The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense said that three Chinese ships, including the aircraft carrier Shandong, crossed the Taiwan Strait on Saturday, which has turned into a geopolitical powder keg in recent years. “A three-ship PLA (People’s Liberation Army) flotilla, led by the aircraft carrier Shandong, passed through the Taiwan Strait around noon today,” the island’s ministry said in a statement. The ships headed “west of the median line towards the north”, he added, referring to this invisible border drawn unilaterally by the United States during the Cold War, which Beijing refuses to recognize. .
While the presence of Chinese warships in the Taiwan Strait is constantly monitored and announced almost daily by Taipei, that of the aircraft carrier Shandong is unusual. Taiwan’s armed forces “monitored the situation and tasked (civilian air patrol) aircraft, navy ships and land-based missile systems to respond to these activities,” the island’s ministry said.
On Saturday, 33 warplanes and 10 ships were “detected at 6 a.m.”, according to the island’s defense ministry. The day before, 11 ships were near Taiwanese waters. Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China has viewed Taiwan as a province that it has yet to successfully reunify with the rest of its territory.
show of strength
According to Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China institute at the University of London, the passage of the aircraft carrier Shandong in the Taiwan Strait is “very unusual”. “But the Chinese have tried to demonstrate their military power around Taiwan in the last six months or in the last year,” he told AFP. Thus, the appearance of Shandong in the strait is part of this “general context”, according to Steve Tsang.
The last time Taiwan authorities reported the Chinese aircraft carrier’s presence in the Taiwan Strait was in March 2022. It was deployed there ahead of a phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his American counterpart, Joe Biden. Relations between Beijing and Taipei, at their lowest since Xi Jinping came to power more than 10 years ago, have deteriorated further in recent years and China has stepped up military incursions around the island.
This latest show of force from Beijing comes just over a month after the end of its major military maneuvers around the island in April, which aimed to encircle Taiwan for three days. During these exercises, Beijing simulated targeted bombardments against the autonomous island and an encirclement of Taiwan, whose authorities had detected 12 Chinese warships and 91 planes on the last day of operations.
Fighter jets had also been deployed from China’s aircraft carrier Shandong and crossed the median line, Taiwan’s defense ministry said at the time. These military maneuvers by China came days after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, to which Beijing had promised to react.