Taiwan carried out military drills yesterday with naval chiefs assuring residents the island is safe, as concerns grow that tensions will escalate with China after recent presidential elections.
The drills were the first since Tsai Ing-wen of the China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to victory in the elections earlier this month.
She ousted the ruling Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), bringing to an end eight years of unprecedented rapprochement with China.
Yesterday, the Taiwanese navy displayed eight warships and fired flares from a missile corvette during an exercise in waters off Tsoying in southern Taiwan, home to the island’s naval headquarters.
It was the second and final day of the drills which saw a group of elite frogmen land on a beach in motorboats Tuesday on the island of Kinmen — a Taiwan-controlled outpost island near China’s southeastern Xiamen city.
A fleet of F-16 fighter jets were also scrambled in another exercise Tuesday at the southern Chiayi airbase.
“With the Lunar New Year approaching, our citizens can feel at ease we are able to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait,” Vice Admiral Tsai Hung-tu, head of the navy’s political warfare office, told AFP.
Military exercises are routinely carried out by Taiwan before the Lunar New Year holidays which fall in February this year.
Although Tsai has pledged to maintain the status quo with Beijing, relations are widely expected to cool as the DPP is traditionally a pro-independence party.
It does not recognise that Taiwan is part of “one China” — a principle insisted upon by Beijing.
China’s state-controlled CCTV last week released footage it claimed depicted a drill recently carried out by Chinese forces, off the southeast coast of the mainland, near Taiwan.
Taiwan’s defence ministry dismissed the footage, saying the images were collated from past manoeuvres.
A Taiwanese defence ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity told AFP that the move was part of Beijing’s “psychological warfare” against Taiwan.
China has 1,500 missiles trained on Taiwan, according to the island’s defence ministry.
China fired test missiles into the Taiwan Strait in a bid to deter voters in the island’s first democratic elections in 1996.
Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou’s planned trip to the Taiwanese-held island of Itu Aba in the disputed South China Sea is “extremely unhelpful” and won’t do anything to resolve disputes over the waterway, a US official said yesterday.
Ma’s office earlier announced that the president, who steps down in May, would fly to Itu Aba today to offer Chinese New Year wishes to residents on the island, mainly Taiwanese coastguard personnel and environmental scholars.
But Ma’s one-day visit to Itu Aba, known as Taiping in Taiwan, comes amid growing international concern over rising tensions in the waterway and quickly drew the ire of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the de facto US embassy in Taipei in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.
“We are disappointed that president Ma Ying-jeou plans to travel to Taiping Island,” AIT spokeswoman Sonia Urbom said in an email to Reuters.
“Such an action is extremely unhelpful and does not contribute to the peaceful resolution of disputes in the South China Sea.”
The United States wanted Taiwan and all claimants to lower tensions, rather than taking actions that could raise them, Urbom added.
On a visit to Beijing yesterday, US secretary of state John Kerry said Washington and Beijing needed to find a way to ease tensions in the South China Sea, through which $5tn in ship-borne trade passes every year.
“We talked about the possibility of a diplomatic way forward and foreign minister Wang Yi accepted the idea that it would be worth exploring whether or not there was a way to reduce the tensions and solve some of the challenges through diplomacy,” Kerry said.
Both Taiwan and China claim most of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims. Vietnam’s most senior official in Taiwan said Hanoi “resolutely opposes” Ma’s planned visit.
Itu Aba lies in the Spratly archipelago, where China’s rapid construction of seven man-made islands has drawn alarm across parts of Asia and been heavily criticised by Washington.
Taiwan has just finished a $100mn port upgrade and built a new lighthouse on Itu Aba, which has its own airstrip, a hospital and fresh water.
Ma’s visit follows elections won by the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ma’s office said it had asked DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen to send a representative, but the party said it had no plans to do so.
Beijing, recognised by most of the world as the head of “one China”, deems Taiwan a wayward province to be retaken by force if necessary.
Yann-huei Song, a prominent Taiwan scholar who advises the government on South China Sea issues, said Ma was making the trip to make sure Taiwan, recognised by only a handful of countries, had a voice.
“No one is listening to Taiwan,” Song, who is a research fellow with the prestigious Academia Sinica in Taiwan, told Reuters. “You are not allowed to participate in the multilateral dispute mechanism. What would you do?”
Ian Storey, a South China Sea expert at Singapore’s ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, said he expected the Philippines and Vietnam to lodge a strong protest.
“But I do think it is unlikely they would stage a similar visit involving a senior political figure going to one of their own occupied islands ... that would risk inflaming relations with China and neither want to go that far,” Storey said.
Asked to comment on Ma’s planned visit, the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office reiterated that China and Taiwan had a common duty to protect Chinese sovereignty in the waterway.
“Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as safeguarding the overall interests of the Chinese nation is the common responsibility and obligation of compatriots across the straits,” spokesman Ma Xiaoguang told reporters in Beijing.