Taipei | Chinese military planes carried out 159 incursions into Taiwan’s air defense zone in November, according to the AFP database, amid mounting military pressure from Beijing on the democratic autonomous island.
November was the third month in a row that more than 100 warplanes made inroads into this sensitive space, with 100 fighter jets and nine Chinese nuclear-capable H6 bombers.
In the past 14 months, the threat has reached new heights after Beijing began sending increasing numbers of military jets into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (Adiz).
The Taiwanese Defense Ministry began publicizing these Chinese warplane incursions into the Adiz in September 2020, and AFP has compiled a database of the details of these flights, which have grown in size and size. frequency.
This escalation has heightened the fears of Western allies like the United States and Japan, who fear that China will order an invasion of Taiwan, which it considers one of its provinces. However, they consider this eventuality unlikely for the moment.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon unveiled plans to bolster deployments and bases directed against China, modernizing and expanding military installations in Guam and Australia.
Almost daily
The defense area does not correspond to the airspace of Taiwan, but encompasses a much larger area that intersects part of the air defense identification area of China.
Beijing was content to probe the southwestern part of the area, with small flights almost daily put a strain on the Taiwanese fleet of hunters, already aging.
October remains the busiest with 196 incursions, including 149 in just four days, as Beijing celebrated its annual national holiday.
In November, there were fewer large-scale incursions, but planes poured in almost daily, with just three days not marked by new incursions.
“The situation is particularly grim with almost uninterrupted incursions,” Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said on Monday, when 27 Chinese planes were registered the day before, a record in November and the fifth largest daily incursion. recorded.
China’s goal “is to slowly exhaust you, to let you know (that they have) that power,” he commented.
Chiu has previously warned that military tensions between Taiwan and China are at their highest level in four decades, adding that Beijing would be in a position to launch a full-scale invasion in 2025.
Since the start of the year, nearly 900 Chinese planes have entered Taiwan’s Adiz, and more than a thousand since the Defense Ministry began reporting.
A biannual defense report published in October points out that China has increased “threats in the gray area”, such as incursions of warplanes, in an attempt to “capture Taiwan without a fight.”
The “gray area” is a term used by military analysts to describe aggressive state-backed actions, which stop before open warfare, also described as “the land of limbo between peace and war” by the secretary. British Defense Ben Wallace.
“The coercive action of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is clearly aimed at bringing Taiwan to its knees and pulling us away from our democratic partners,” Foreign Minister Joseph Wu tweeted on Monday.
“Make no mistake: we will never give in to pressure from the CCP,” he added.