The Taiwanese armed forces recorded 33 aircraft and 10 ships of the People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA) approaching the island in a day, as it follows from a statement by the island’s defense department.
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“From Friday, May 26, 06:00 to May 27, 06:00, 33 aircraft and 10 ships of the People’s Liberation Army of China were observed around Taiwan,” the agency said on Twitter.
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It is noted that 12 aircraft entered the island’s air defense identification zone in the southwest and southeast, including four Su-30 fighters, four J-10s, a Y-8 transport aircraft, a WZ-7 drone, a J-16 fighter and a helicopter Z-9.
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The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after a visit to the island in early August last year by then-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.
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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.
