BEIJING, Oct 2 – Novosti. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) dispatched 22 aircraft and four warships to an area near Taiwan on Sunday, the island’s defense ministry said in a daily report .
As follows from a message published on the agency’s official Twitter account, as of 17:00 (12:00 Moscow time) on Sunday, four ships and 22 PLA aircraft were spotted in the waters and airspace of the area surrounding Taiwan, with eight of them being two fighters. J-11, two J-16 fighters, BZK-005 and CH-4 drones, Y-8 and Y-9 multi-purpose transport aircraft crossed the so-called “median line” in the Taiwan Strait and entered the island’s air defense identification zone.
Taiwan sent an air patrol to monitor the situation, issued radio warnings, and deployed anti-aircraft missile systems, according to the agency.
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after the visit to the island in early August of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing in this move US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
