The Taiwanese armed forces over the past day recorded the approach of seven aircraft and three ships of the People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA) to the island, follows from the daily report of the Taiwanese defense department.
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“From 06:00 on March 7 to 06:00 on March 8, seven planes and three ships of the People’s Liberation Army of China were observed around Taiwan,” the agency said on Twitter.
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Taiwan sent air and sea patrols to monitor the situation and deployed ground-based missile systems, the ministry said.
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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.
