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China’s recent decision to launch missiles over Taiwan is a “gorilla in space” that needs to be challenged, a senior US military commander said Tuesday.
Beijing held huge air and sea drills around Taiwan this month in an angry response to the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a congressional delegation.
Those drills included launching multiple ballistic missiles into waters off Taiwan — some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes — and it was the first time China had taken such a move since the mid-1990s.
“It’s very important that we challenge things like this. I know the gorilla in space is launching missiles over Taiwan,” Vice Admiral Karl Thomas, commander of the Seventh Fleet, told reporters in Singapore.
“If we just allow that and don’t deny that, that’s going to be the next norm,” he added.
“It is irresponsible to launch missiles over Taiwan into international waters where shipping routes lie, where free shipping works.”
The Seventh Fleet is based in Japan and is a core part of Washington’s naval presence in the Pacific.
During exercises this month, Chinese state media reported that some of the ballistic missiles fired by the People’s Liberation Army traced a trajectory directly over Taiwan’s capital Taipei, a new escalation that Beijing has been unable to confirm.
Thomas likened the threats against Taiwan to the South China Sea, where Beijing spent years establishing military bases and installations on a series of contested atolls while denying it had done just that.
“If you don’t challenge it … suddenly it can become like the islands in the South China Sea (which) have now become military outposts,” he said.
“They are now fully operational military outposts with missiles, large airstrips, hangers, radars and listening posts.”
China’s Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, but it regards the island as its territory and has vowed to one day conquer the island, by force if necessary.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, saber-rattling against Taiwan has intensified.
The United States and other Western allies have increased “freedom of navigation” crossings by naval vessels in both the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to bolster the concept that those seas are international waterways, sparking anger in Beijing.
China said it held fresh military drills Monday when a delegation of US lawmakers visited Taipei.
State media released footage and images of Taiwan’s Penghu Islands allegedly taken by Chinese jets flying a short distance from the archipelago.
But Taiwan denied that Chinese jets came near Penghu.
“The CCP used cognitive warfare and other tricks to exaggerate and show that (their jet) Penghu was close. That’s not true,” senior Air Force official Tung Pei-Lun told reporters on Tuesday.
The Penghu Islands lie between mainland China and Taiwan.
They are home to a major Taiwanese air base and would be at the forefront of any attempt to invade Beijing.
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