TAIWAN AIR FORCE STAGES DRILL AMID TENSIONS WITH BEIJING

Taiwan screamed its fighter jets into the sky along the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday in a drill simulating a war scenario, to show its combat capabilities and readiness in view of increasing tensions with Beijing.

Fighter jets of Taiwan’s Air force took off from the southern city of Chiayi which is also the home to U.S. made F-16 fighter jets that are frequently scrambled to intercept Chinese warplanes. As per the local media reports, the exercises are part of a three-day drill to show Taiwan’s preparedness ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of this month. Since the last few months, tensions across the sensitive Taiwan Strait had increased, with Taiwan protesting against repeated Chinese incursion of its airspace. Talking to the reporters, Major Yen Hsiang-sheng of Taiwan’s Air force, who leads the group which regularly intercept Chinese fighter jets said, “With the very high frequency of Communist planes entering our Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), pilots from our wing are very experienced and have dealt with almost all types of their aircraft,”. Taiwan has termed China’s activities as “grey zone” warfare, designed to both wear out Taiwan’s forces by making them repeatedly scramble, and also to test its responses.

Experts believe that the recent developments along the Taiwan Strait are significant as it comes just days after Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen had warned China that military confrontation would be a miscalculation and stressed on the need for both countries to work hard to take care of people’s livelihoods and calm the hearts of the people in order to find peaceful solutions to the long-standing disputes and problems. The issue of Taiwan which is also called as ‘Taiwan Strait Issue’, is a result of the Chinese Civil War and the subsequent split of China into the two present-day self-governing entities of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (ROC; commonly known as Taiwan). Taiwan claims that it is an independent country and has repeatedly vowed to defend its freedom and democracy while Beijing claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has increased military and diplomatic pressure in the past two years to assert its sovereignty claims. In recent times China has also not ruled out using force to bring Taiwan under its control.