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China’s military has launched 10 hours of live-fire exercises around Taiwan, as US President Donald Trump played down the seriousness of the latest large-scale manoeuvres.
“They’ve been doing naval exercises for 20 years in that area,” Trump said. “Now people take it a little bit differently.”
Trump, speaking at a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, said he had a “great relationship” with President Xi Jinping and that the Chinese leader “hasn’t told me anything about” the drills.
“Nothing worries me,” Trump added.
Tuesday’s exercises marked the second day of large-scale army, naval, air and rocket force operations around Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command.
Chinese military officials have said that the drills, dubbed “Justice Mission 2025”, would test the PLA’s combat readiness as well as its ability to blockade Taiwan’s ports and deter external forces.
The drills came just 11 days after the US approved an $11bn arms sale to Taiwan, the largest weapons procurement deal of its kind between Washington and Taipei.
Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesperson for China’s defence ministry, urged “relevant countries” to “abandon the illusion of using Taiwan to contain China”.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said that by 6am on Tuesday morning it had detected 130 Chinese military aircraft and 14 naval vessels.
Of the 130 sorties, 90 had entered Taiwan’s northern, central, south-western and eastern air defence identification zone. An ADIZ stretches beyond the boundary of a country’s national airspace and provides an early warning system to help detect possible incursions into sovereign airspace.
Transport officials in Taipei said that disruptions to commercial air travel would affect more than 100,000 passengers.
Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has threatened to take control by force if Taipei resists its pressure indefinitely. In recent years it has sharply escalated its military assertiveness, including near-daily military activities in Taiwanese airspace and waters.
Taiwan has condemned the drills and accused the Chinese Communist party of threatening global peace and stability. It vowed to meet Beijing’s threat with preparedness “alongside our democratic partners”.
Wang Wenjuan, a researcher at the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, told the CCP’s nationalist mouthpiece Global Times that naming this week’s drills “Justice” reflected their purpose of opposing “Taiwan independence”, separatism and external interference, and demonstrated the full “legitimacy and legality” of the exercise.
Nicholas Burns, a former US ambassador to Beijing and professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said China’s “massive exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan should be condemned worldwide”.
“Beijing revealing once again it is the true threat to peace in the Taiwan Strait, not Washington and Tokyo,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Any escalation in military activity around Taiwan could trouble US-China relations, including the fragile truce Trump and Xi struck in the trade war between the world’s largest economies in October.
The drills also highlighted renewed tensions between China and Japan, after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a military response from Tokyo.
Cartography by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong
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