TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan’s defence ministry said on Friday it had not spotted any Chinese military aircraft crossing the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait in the past 24 hours, following days of military drills by Beijing around the island.
China began the exercises last Saturday after Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen returned from Los Angeles where she met U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy, infuriating Beijing.
China views democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, claims the government in Taipei strongly reject.
In its regular morning report on Chinese military activities in the prior 24-hour period, Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had seen four Chinese military aircraft and eight Chinese warships around Taiwan.
But in an accompanying map of China’s activities it did not show any Chinese warplanes crossing the Taiwan Strait’s median line, which normally serves as an unofficial barrier between the two.
China says it does not recognise the median line and has since August, when it staged war games after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, flown fighter jets regularly across it.
The ministry’s map showed a single Chinese Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft flying in an area between Taiwan’s southwest coast and the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands at the top of the South China Sea.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Lincoln Feast.)
