China’s military drills in response to Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen transiting through the US are on par with the reaction seen by Beijing last year, Taiwan’s foreign minister said Monday, comments that come as the People’s Liberation Army held a third day of exercises.
“If you compare the two sets of military drills, I will say the one in August last year to be more intense,” Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said in an interview with Bloomberg News Monday, referring to Beijing’s entire response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting the island.
“So altogether, it was a more serious one at the time, but this time around, if you look at the intensity of their air threat, or naval threat against Taiwan, I think it’s similar to what we saw at the time.”
Last summer, the PLA not only conducted air and sea exercises but also fired missiles over the island, launched cyber attacks and used economic coercion in response to Pelosi’s trip, Wu added.
Tsai last week transited the US and met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California. She also received a US congressional delegation in Taipei over the weekend upon her return from the US. The Biden administration has urged China to refrain from increasing tensions and using the transit as a pretext to change the status quo in the strait.
Wu also criticized Beijing for finding “excuses” to launch military exercises and said the acts cannot be tolerated.
“We need to prevent China from having the illusion that they can take Taiwan over quickly,” he said. “And therefore we need to speed up Taiwan’s preparedness and we’ve been doing that.”
The nationalist Global Times newspaper cited Zhao Xiaozhuo, a research fellow at the Academy of Military Sciences, as saying that the PLA is practicing targeting key military targets including airfields and other buildings during the drills.