The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted multiple drills across China’s western border with India over the past week, while the PLA’s eastern theater command carried out exercises near Taiwan on Tuesday.
China is currently engaged in ongoing territorial disputes with both India and Taiwan. Beijing’s land dispute with New Delhi stems from a deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian border regiments in northern India’s Ladakh state in June 2020. The clash began a standoff between the two nations along their unmarked Himalayan boundary that continues unresolved today. Beijing has concurrently ramped up its military intimidation of Taiwan — a sovereign island nation off China’s southeastern coast — in recent months. China claims Taiwan is a renegade province and has vowed to “reunify” the island with China by force if necessary.
The state-run China Central Television (CCTV) detailed the PLA’s latest actions near China’s western frontier with India on November 6, writing:
An artillery regiment affiliated with the PLA Xinjiang Military Command recently conducted a comprehensive, cross-day-and-night exercise in a high-altitude region, involving live-fire shooting of PCL-181 155mm self-propelled howitzers and PHL-11 122mm multiple rocket launchers, as the drill tested the troops’ fire strike efficiency and combat capabilities under the harsh cold in plateau regions.
Xinjiang is China’s westernmost region. It shares land borders with several other Asian nations, including India.
This photo taken on October 17, 2019 shows a J-16 fighter jet performing in the sky during the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Aviation Open Day in Changchun. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)
CCTV on November 8 described another “recent” PLA event in which the Chinese military conducted a “confrontation drill” along China’s western boundary with India.
“In another recent event, held deep in a plateau region at an elevation of 5,100 meters, the PLA Xinjiang Military Command organized a joint fire strike confrontation drill,” the news outlet reported.
The exercises included “PHL-03 300mm multiple rocket launchers and China’s latest type of multiple rocket launchers capable of firing 370mm rockets team[ing] up with reconnaissance drones and artillery radars to launch precision strikes on the enemy.”
The PLA’s latest border drills near India came in response to similar activity by the Indian army, according to a report by China’s state-run Global Times on November 8. The newspaper said India’s military “launched a major exercise” along India’s border with China sometime at the start of November.
Meanwhile, on China’s eastern front, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) ordered “six PLA aircraft, namely four J-16 fighter jets, a Y-8 reconnaissance aircraft and a Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft” to enter the southwest corner of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on November 9.
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