The Chinese Army protested this Monday over the flight, during today, of a US reconnaissance plane over the Taiwan Strait which, according to Beijing, poses “a threat to regional peace and stability”.
The spokesman for the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Colonel Shi Yi, said in a statement that a US P-8A military reconnaissance plane flew over the Taiwan Strait on Monday.
“The PLA tracked and monitored the entire flight. This is a deliberate action by the United States to disrupt the situation in the region and damage peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. China is strongly opposed,” the spokesperson said.
He added that Chinese army troops “remain on alert to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity with full determination.”
Meanwhile, the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet confirmed on its website the passage of the P-8A Poseidon – a naval patrol and reconnaissance aircraft – through the Taiwan Strait in “international space”.
“The United States will continue to fly and sail anywhere international law allows, including within the Taiwan Strait. The United States thus defends the rights and freedoms of navigation of all nations. This transit demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.
In Taiwan, its Ministry of Defense also confirmed the overflight of the US plane in a statement, although it stressed that “it is nothing out of the ordinary.”
US aircraft have regularly flown over the Taiwan Strait for several years, but military aircraft rarely do so.
The last time this happened was in June 2022, a day after China sent 29 aircraft into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).
The island is one of the biggest sources of conflict between China and the United States, mainly because Washington is Taiwan’s main arms supplier and its main ally in the event of a war with Beijing.
Tensions escalated last summer on account of the visit of the then president of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, strongly protested by the Chinese authorities, who described it as a “farce” and “deplorable betrayal”.
Taiwan has been considered a sovereign territory with its own government and political system under the name of the Republic of China since the end of the civil war between nationalists and communists in 1949, but Beijing maintains that it is a rebel province and insists that it return to what called common homeland.
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