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China is to begin a series of unprecedented live-fire drills that would effectively blockade the island of Taiwan, just hours after the departure of US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whose controversial visit this week has sparked fears of a crisis in the Taiwan strait.
Taiwan has characterised the drills, which will last until Sunday afternoon – and will include missile tests and other “military operations” as close as nine miles to Taiwan’s coastline – as a violation of international law.
Ahead of the drill, it said 27 Chinese warplanes had entered its air defence zone.
Pelosi arrived in Taipei on Tuesday night under intense global scrutiny, and was met by the foreign minister Joseph Wu and the US representative in Taiwan, Sandra Oudkirk.
She addressed Taiwan’s parliament on Wednesday before having public and private meetings with the president, Tsai Ing-wen.
“Our delegation came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear we will not abandon Taiwan, and we are proud of our enduring friendship,” Pelosi said on Wednesday, when she was given Taiwan’s highest civilian order by Tsai.
She said US solidarity with Taiwan was “crucial” in facing an increasingly authoritarian China.
In a later statement, she said China could not prevent world leaders from travelling to Taiwan “to pay respect to its flourishing democracy”.
As Pelosi’s plane took off from Songshan airport on Wednesday evening, Wu waved goodbye from the tarmac. But as the American left, Taiwan was facing days of military activity which threaten to escalate into a fourth Taiwan strait crisis.
Taiwan’s defence ministry accused Beijing of planning to violate the international convention on the law of sea, by breaching Taiwan’s sovereign territory.
While China’s military often holds live-fire exercises in the strait and surrounding seas, those planned for this week encircle Taiwan’s main island and target areas within its territorial sea.
Veerle Nouwens, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based thinktank, said the location of the six exclusion zones was noteworthy.
