China Responds to Kevin McCarthy Meeting by Practicing Taiwan Missile Assault

China responded to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen by conducting three days of aggressive military drills off the coast of Taiwan over the weekend. 

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that China’s response to the McCarthy-Tsai meeting at the Reagan Library in California on Wednesday was initially more “muted” than its hysterical tantrum after McCarthy’s predecessor Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited Taiwan in August.

That changed on Saturday, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began three days of “combat readiness” exercises around Taiwan billed as a “stern warning” to “Taiwan secessionist forces and foreign forces.”

According to the Taiwanese Defense Ministry, Chinese warplanes flew 70 sorties during a ten-hour period on Sunday, including heavy nuclear-capable bombers.

Half of those flights passed over the “median line” in the Strait of Taiwan, which was long viewed as an unofficial border between Chinese and Taiwanese airspace that both sides respected to avoid military escalation. Communist China said it would no longer respect the median line in 2020 and began aggressively pushing over it with large numbers of warplanes after Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

China’s state-run Global Times extensively detailed the “Joint Sword” exercises on Sunday, portraying them as a “firm response” to Tsai’s visit to California. 

PLA spokesmen said China’s aircraft carrier Shandong and its support group were part of the exercises, which “gathered all military services and branches with complete combat elements, with all of them equipped with live munitions and radars turned on.”

The drills included simulated missile attacks on Taiwan, accompanied by a PLA-produced “computer-generated animation depicting its mock joint precision strikes on the island of Taiwan.”

“The animation shows that conventional missiles and long-range rocket launchers on the land, warplanes in the air and warships at sea simultaneously launched attacks from multiple directions of the island,” the Global Times gushed.

The U.S. State Department “urged restraint” and told China not to consider changing the “status quo” of Taiwan through military force.

A State Department spokesman said the U.S. was “monitoring Beijing’s actions closely” and remained “comfortable and confident that we have in place sufficient resources and capabilities in the region to ensure peace and stability and to meet our national security commitments.”

“As we have said, there is no reason for Beijing to turn this transit — which was consistent with longstanding US practice and policy — into something it is not or use it as pretext to overreact,” the State Department said on Saturday, referring to Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy.

Speaker McCarthy said he was not intimidated by China’s demonstration of military power around Taiwan:

The Taiwanese armed forces said they closely monitored the PLA drills and would remain on “high alert” until they were concluded. The PLA Eastern Theater Command claimed the Joint Sword program concluded on Monday.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it was “keeping a close eye on the PLA Rocket Force using the joint intelligence and surveillance system, in case the PLA conducts live-fire rocket and missile drills in nearby waters.” 

The Taipei Times on Monday quoted Wang Chih-sheng, secretary-general of the Asia-Pacific Elite Interchange Association, dismissing the PLA drills as “a lot of thunder, but little rain.”

“The exercises are not so much a sanction against Taiwan as they are a form of internal propaganda. The main purpose is to appease domestic nationalist sentiment in China,” Wang said.

“Part of the live-fire exercises were concentrated near China’s coastal areas, such as Pingtan County in Fujian Province, showing that they were held for a domestic audience,” he pointed out.

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