TAIPEI 31 Aug (Online): Taipei and Beijing have traded barbs over a recent string of drone sorties from the Chinese mainland to an outlying Taiwanese island, as Taiwan\u2019s president on Tuesday vowed \u201cstrong countermeasures\u201d against such incursions.<\/p>\n
Photos and video taken by Chinese drones of the Kinmen islands have been circulating on both Taiwa\u00acnese and Chinese social media, with one video showing Taiwanese soldiers hurling rocks at one to drive it off.<\/p>\n
While visiting air force facilities in offshore Penghu islands, President Tsai Ing-wen said China had used \u201cgreyzone\u201d tactics such as drone intrusion to continue its \u201cmilitary intimidation\u201d against Taiwan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to tell everyone that the more provocative the enemy is, the more calm we need to be… we will not provoke a war and we will restrain ourselves, but that does not mean that we will not take countermoves,\u201d she told the troops stationed in the archipelago in the Taiwan Strait.<\/p>\n
Tsai added that she had ordered the defence ministry \u201cto take necessary and strong countermeasures at an appropriate time to defend the security of our airspace\u201d.<\/p>\n
Asked to comment on the videos, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the incursions were not \u201canything worth making a fuss about\u201d as the drones were \u201cflying around Chinese territory\u201d.<\/p>\n
But that response triggered an angry riposte from Taipei, which compared the drone harassment to the acts of a \u201cthief\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose who come uninvited are called thieves, whether they are breaking through the door or peeping from the air, the people of Taiwan do not welcome such thieves,\u201d Taiwan\u2019s foreign ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe authoritarian expansionist government of the Chinese Communist Party has always made harassing other countries a daily routine, and therefore its title of a \u2018regional troublemaker\u2019 is well deserved.\u201d Taiwan lives under constant threat of invasion by China, which claims the self-ruled democratic island as part of its territory to be seized one day, by force if necessary.<\/p>\n
Drone incursions over Kinmen have increased at the same time Beijing embarked on a show of force in retaliation for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi\u2019s visit to Taiwan earlier this month.<\/p>\n
For a week after Pelosi\u2019s visit, China sent warships, missiles and fighter jets into the waters and skies around Taiwan, its largest and most aggressive exercises since the mid-1990s. It is not clear who is flying the drones from the Chinese mainland.<\/p>\n
Kinmen lies just a few kilometres off China\u2019s coast, meaning a civilian could feasibly fly a commercial drone that distance.<\/p>\n
However China has also stepped up so-called \u201cgreyzone\u201d tactics against Taiwan in recent years to pressure the island. \u201cGreyzone\u201d is a term used by military analysts to describe aggressive actions by a state that stop short of open warfare and can use civilians.<\/p>\n
Civilian Chinese fishing and sand dredging vessels, for example, have increasingly entered waters around Taiwanese outlying islands in recent years. China has also ramped up incursions by warplanes into Taiwan\u2019s air defence identification zone, an area it previously tended to avoid.<\/p>\n
Taiwan\u2019s defence ministry has so far only fired flares to warn off the drones but it has said it will take \u201cnecessary countermeasures\u201d, including shooting down the drones if needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TAIPEI 31 Aug (Online): Taipei and Beijing have traded barbs over a recent string of drone sorties from the Chinese mainland to an outlying Taiwanese island, as Taiwan\u2019s president on Tuesday vowed \u201cstrong countermeasures\u201d against such incursions. Photos and video taken by Chinese drones of […]<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-world-news"],"yoast_head":"\n