The Chinese military’s exercises around Taiwan are a warning to separatist and outside forces and a necessary measure to protect China’s sovereignty, Shi Yi, spokesman for the Eastern Zone Combat Command of the People’s Liberation Army of China, said on Saturday.
⠀
Earlier on Saturday, Shi Yi said that the Chinese armed forces will conduct exercises and combat patrols in the sea and airspace around Taiwan on April 8-10 in accordance with the combat training plan. The island’s defense ministry said it was closely monitoring the Chinese army’s exercises.
⠀
“This is a serious warning against collusion and provocation by the pro-Taiwan independence separatist forces with outside forces, and a necessary measure to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Shi Yi said in a statement posted on the official account of the Eastern Combat Command Zone in WeChat social networks.
⠀
The exercises started on Saturday morning Beijing time.
⠀
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.
⠀
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.
