China Pushes Back Line US Drew to Keep Peace in Taiwan Strait

Bloomberg News
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(Bloomberg) -- China has sent warplanes across the Taiwan Strait’s so-called median line almost daily since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit last month, shrinking a buffer zone that has helped keep the peace for decades.

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An average of 10 Chinese aircraft have crossed the US-drawn boundary every day since Aug. 3, when Pelosi became the first House speaker to visit Taipei in a quarter century, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

The incursions were once a rare event, with just three instances in the first seven months of the year.

The flights show how China is attempting to use Pelosi’s one-night stay in Taipei to establish a lasting presence closer to Taiwan. While Beijing has never officially recognized the median line, which the US drew in 1954 during an earlier period of cross-strait tensions, its military has largely respected the boundary over the years.

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The incursions effectively shrink the buffer zone between the two sides and reduce the amount of time that Taiwan’s military has to react to any attack from China. They’re an extension of similar flights into Taiwan’s southwestern air-defense-identification zone and “encirclement patrols” around the main island that the People’s Liberation Army has ramped up in recent years.

The recent spate of trips across the median line began the day that Pelosi met President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei as part of a series of military drills that included ballistic missiles fired over Taiwan. Since then, China has only gone two days without reporting incursions across the line -- on Aug. 27 and Aug. 31 -- although the numbers have tapered off.

In the aftermath of Pelosi’s visit, Major General Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the PLA’s National Defense University in Beijing, told state broadcaster China Central Television that the drills had “deterred Taiwan independence forces and completely shattered the so-called strait median line.”

The challenge now is for the US to reestablish the boundary, with Pelosi saying the US couldn’t let China set a “new normal” around Taiwan. On Sunday, the US Navy sailed two Ticonderoga-class cruisers through the body of water, the first time that type of missile-laden vessel was used in a such a transit in the past five years.

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