China’s military tracks US warship traversing Taiwan Strait

Name: Taiwan says it will fight ‘to the very last day’ as Beijing sends fighter jets
Uploaded: 2021-04-07T16:20:28.000Z
Duration: 1 min 5 s
Description: Taiwan says it will fight ‘to the very last day’ as Beijing sends fighter jets

Taiwanese authorities say 15 Chinese military aircraft, including a dozen fighter jets, crossed into their defence zone

Taipei warns Beijing that the island will ‘defend ourselves to the very last day’ if necessary

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The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain. Photo: US 7th Fleet

Jacob Fromer

Published: 12:20am, 8 Apr 2021Updated: 10:18am, 8 Apr 2021

China’s military confirmed that it had tracked a US warship as it traversed the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, a move the US described as a routine freedom of navigation exercise and Beijing denounced as destabilising to the region.

It came on the same day that Taiwanese authorities said 15 Chinese military aircraft, including a dozen fighter jets, had crossed into their defence zone, and warned Beijing that the island would “defend ourselves to the very last day” if necessary.

“The US move to send warship to sail through the Taiwan Strait and hype it publicly is an old trick to ‘manipulate’ the cross-Strait situation,” Senior Colonel Zhang Chunhui, spokesman for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theatre Command, said in a statement. “China is firmly opposed to that.”

A statement from the US military’s Seventh Fleet said the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain’s transit through the Taiwan Strait “demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific”.

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Taiwan says it will fight ‘to the very last day’ as Beijing sends fighter jets

“The United States military will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” the statement said.