Soon after Nicaragua severed ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China, 13 Chinese fighter jets entered Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on Friday (December 10).
The Defense Ministry of Taiwan issued a statement, saying that all the Chinese military aircraft, including a sortie of two H-6 bombers, a Y-8 electronic warfare plane, a Y-8 anti-submarine warfare plane, a KJ-500 third-generation airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) plane, six Shenyang J-16 and two Chengdu J-10 fighter jets, entered the East Asian nation's southwestern ADIZ. They intruded deep into the ADIZ.
According to the statement, Taiwan immediately sent a combat air patrol and deployed air defense missile systems, apart from sending radio warnings, in order to track the Chinese military fleet. The Taiwanese Ministry has claimed that the Chinese war planes often violates Taiwan's air defense zone.
The Ministry has also been publishing information about such air space violations since September 17, 2020, amid a growing diplomatic tension between the two countries. In September 2020, China stepped up its grey-zone tactics, and started sending fighter jets to Taiwan's ADIZ. ADIZs are basically early warning systems that help a country detect incursions into its airspace. Usually, any aircraft informs the 'host' nation about the purpose of using the air route before entering the latter's airspace.
China does so as it claims full sovereignty over Taiwan. However, Taiwan, a democratic Island nation of almost 24 million people located off the southeastern coast of mainland China, has rejected China's claim, time and again. In order to counter the Chinese aggression, Taipei City has strengthened strategic ties with the US and other Democratic countries across the globe. As expected, Taiwan's proximity with the US has irked China, which has threatened that 'Independence of Taiwan' would lead to a war.
