Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the Chinese Communist Party’s military flights near Taiwan appear to be “rehearsals,” adding that he didn’t want to “speculate” about the movement.
“I don’t want to speculate, but certainly … it looks a lot like rehearsals,” Austin told Fox News’ Bret Baier at the 2021 Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Saturday.
Austin’s remarks come after months of near daily Chinese warplane drills around the independent island nation.
In late November, China flew 27 warplanes around Taiwan and entered its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), prompting the island nation to deploy fighter jets, activate its missile defenses and issue radio warnings for China to leave.
The wave of warplanes was not the largest China has sent towards Taiwan, but marked the largest China has deployed around Taiwan in several weeks as part of an ongoing campaign of nearly daily aerial sorties around the island.
In October, China sent 52 warplanes towards Taiwan, setting the single-day record for aircraft deployed around the island. That wave of 52 Chinese warplanes came at the end of a four-day period in which China sent nearly 150 warplanes towards Taiwan.
China isn’t just making moves that appear designed to intimidate Taiwan from the air. Last week, a rights group called Safeguard Defenders warned that China was “hunting” Taiwanese citizens around the world, insisting that they be extradited to the People’s Republic of China.
The group said it had documented hundreds of such cases.
“This international persecution of Taiwan nationals amounts to an assault on Taiwanese sovereignty, and is part of the larger global campaign under Xi Jinping to exploit extradition treaties, mutual law enforcement agreements, and other multilateral institutions for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s political objectives,” the group said in a summary of its report.
No comments:
Post a Comment