Taiwan lawmakers visit Spratlys as garrison stages drill

Three Taiwanese legislators flew to a hotly-contested island in the South China Sea on Tuesday as garrison forces there held a live-fire drill, they said, risking stirring up new tensions in the area.

The lawmakers left an airbase in the south of Taiwan at around 7am on Tuesday on board a C-130 transport plane, arriving at Taiping, the biggest islet in the Spratlys, three-and-a-half hours later.

Immediately following the whirlwind visit, two of the lawmakers, from the ruling Kuomintang party, displayed video footage showing them and the third visitor, from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, watching a live-fire exercise by Taiwanese coastguards on the islet.

“We were very much impressed by their combat capabilities,” Lin Yu-fang, a legislator of the ruling Kuomintang party who sits on parliament’s defence committee, told reporters.

“Although they are coastguards, they definitely match their marine counterparts in terms of their combat capabilities. We have faith in them.”

The Spratlys – a group of islands claimed entirely or in part by Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei – are believed to lie on top of major energy resources and sit near a number of important trading routes.

The Spratlys, and the South China Sea as a whole, have been at the centre of a series of escalating diplomatic rows between countries with overlapping territorial claims.