This foray has been the most important since January 23. Beijing has started in recent years incursion campaigns in the Taiwan defense zone to maintain the aging aviation of Taipei under pressure.
Le Monde with AFP
China proceeded, Monday, May 30, to its second largest incursion of the year in the Taiwan defense area. According to Taipei, thirty planes entered this area, including twenty hunters. These incursions have been the most important since January 23, when 39 planes had entered the air defense identification area (or Adiz, for Air Defense Identification Zone, according to its acronym in English) of the island.
The Taiwanese Minister of Defense announced Monday evening that he had taken off his own planes and deploy air defense missile systems to monitor Chinese activity.
Beijing has started campaigns in the Taiwan defense area in recent years to demonstrate his dissatisfaction and to keep the aging aviation of Taipei under pressure. The island lives under the constant threat of an invasion of China. Beijing considers this territory as its own and promised to recover it, by force if necessary.
969 Aerial incursions
The United States accused Beijing last week of raising tensions about Taiwan, US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, explicitly mentioning the air incursions, example, according to him, of a “rhetoric and of an increasingly provocative activity “.
A few days earlier, US President Joe Biden said Washington was ready to militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an attack on China. But the White House then insisted that its policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the possibility or not of an intervention had not changed.
The Adiz of Taiwan is much wider than its airspace and overlaps in certain points the own Adiz of China, even its territory. A map of the flights provided by the Ministry of Defense shows that the planes entered the southwest corner of the Adiz before coming out. Last year, Taiwan recorded a record of 969 Chinese military air incursions, according to the AFP database, more than double the 380 incursions of 2020.
In the only day of October 4, 2021, 56 aircraft entered the Adiz of Taiwan, and 196 for the whole month of October, which opens with the Chinese national holiday. Taiwan has reported 465 incursions since the start of the year, an increase of almost 50 % compared to the same period last year.
These incursions put under pressure the Taiwanese aviation, which has experienced a series of fatal accidents in recent years. The local press reported on Tuesday the death of a pilot whose plane crashed in Kaohsiung, in the south.
In January, already, a pilot had perished after his F-16V, the most advanced apparatus of the Taiwanese fleet, damaged in sea. In March 2021, Taipei immobilized all its military aviation, after The collision of two flight hunters (one dead, a disappeared) – the third fatal crash in less than six months.