US Navy reconnaissance flight over Taiwan Strait draws angry response from China

A US Navy reconnaissance jet flew over the Taiwan Strait on Monday, in a maneuver intended to assert the right to operate in international airspace despite strong objections from the Chinese military.

In a statement Monday, the US 7th Fleet said the flight of the P-8A Poseidon over the waterway that separates China and the self-ruled island of Taiwan was conducted in accordance with international law, demonstrating “the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

But a spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Army Senior Col. Shi Yi, accused Washington of hyping the flight and inflaming tensions.

The US flight “has deliberately disrupted the regional situation and jeopardized the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Shi said in a report on the PLA’s English language website.

That allegation was amplified in Chinese state media, with a story in the nationalist state-run tabloid Global Times claiming the flight of the US Navy antisubmarine warfare and surveillance jet was “just another provocation aimed at stirring up troubles.”

The US 7th Fleet statement said the US would continue to “fly, sail, and operate anywhere international law allows including within the Taiwan Strait.”

The Chinese Communist Party claims Taiwan, a democratically ruled island of 24 million people, as part of its sovereign territory despite never having controlled it.

Beijing sends military aircraft and ships into the Taiwan Strait on a daily basis as it keeps up military pressure on the island.

On Tuesday, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it spotted 14 PLA aircraft and three naval vessels around the island, including four aircraft that crossed the median line of the strait, which had for decades served as a rarely breached informal demarcation line between the two sides but is now routinely ignored by Beijing.

Tuesday’s PLA deployments were up from four aircraft and three ships spotted by Taiwan on Monday, with none of those crossing the median line.

The US P-8A flight on Monday was the second in less than a week to draw significant attention from the PLA.