Will the PLA send drones over Taiwan in wake of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit?
- Unprecedented drone flights over the island and regular drills off its shores in future PLA exercises would put pressure on Taipei, say military observers
- The PLA will conduct ‘important military exercises with live-fire shooting’ in six demarcated no-entry zones around the island from Thursday to Sunday
One analyst described the prospect of unprecedented PLA unmanned aircraft flights over the island as possible.
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US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrives in Taiwan as Beijing announces live-fire military drills
The exercises will take place partially inside Taiwan’s territorial waters, and one will be held close to its southern port city, Kaohsiung, according to a map released by state news agency Xinhua.
Fu Qianshao, a retired equipment expert from the PLA Air Force, said that given their proximity to Taiwan, the large-scale drills would be a blockade of the island and marked a breakthrough in Beijing’s military actions against the island in terms of location and intensity.
He added that the PLA would also respond to any possible move by the US and Taiwanese air forces in those areas, with Thursday’s drills showing for the first time that Beijing did not recognise Taiwan’s territorial waters.
Beijing sees Taiwan as a breakaway province and vows to take it back, by force if necessary. It has grown increasingly dissatisfied with ever-closer interactions between Taipei and Western governments in the past two years, intensifying its warnings against the self-ruled island.
For the past year, Beijing has escalated its military actions near the island, including sending warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on a near-daily basis, and has been crossing the median line of the strait, a buffer zone the US established in 1954 to prevent a conflict between Beijing and Taiwan.
