Taiwan to ‘shoot down and destroy’ mainland Chinese balloons if they pose a risk
- Security statement comes as BBC report says Japan and Taiwan targeted by Beijing’s spy balloon programme
- Taiwanese military are tracking any movements of high-altitude balloons from mainland China, intelligence officer from island’s defence ministry says
Taiwan will shoot down mainland Chinese balloons if they are seen to present a threat, the island’s military has said.
The BBC reported “multiple images of balloons crossing East Asia”, following a joint project with artificial intelligence company Synthetaic, which analysed huge amounts of satellite data.
Japan has also confirmed that balloons flew over its territory and said it was prepared to shoot them down in future, the report on Monday said.
Announcing a similar strategy at a news conference on Tuesday, Major General Lin Wen-huang, joint operations planning director of Taiwan’s defence ministry, said: “If these balloons are intimidating or risky to Taiwan, we will shoot them down and destroy them to uphold our security.”
Colonel Lo Cheng-yu of the ministry’s intelligence centre said the military had the situation around the Taiwan Strait under effective control and was tracking any movements of high-altitude balloons from mainland China.
“The defence ministry has also maintained first-hand information through the exchange of intelligence with other allies to ensure our overall security,” Lo said.
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China says US balloons flew over Xinjiang, Tibet as diplomatic row deepens
The United States, like most countries, does not recognise Taiwan as independent, but is opposed to any change in the status quo by force – an eventuality Beijing has not renounced. The US is also legally bound to help Taiwan defend itself.
In Taipei, Lo said that so far balloons flying in from the mainland had been mostly “released by meteorological or observatory units” there. These included a balloon whose debris was found in Taiwan’s defence outpost of Dongyin in February.
Asked how many such balloons had been found so far and what action the military had taken if these had indeed been used for spying, Lo declined to give details.
Could China be ready to put the US ‘spy balloon’ blowout behind it?
The BBC report quoted Synthetaic founder Corey Jaskolski as saying that a balloon that had crossed over Japan in 2021 was believed to have been launched from deep inside mainland China, south of Mongolia. “The BBC has been unable to confirm this,” the report said.
It also said two photos taken by Taiwan’s weather service appeared to show a balloon over the island in late September 2021. After cross-referencing them with satellite imagery, “within 90 seconds, we found the balloon off the coast of Taiwan”, the BBC quoted Jaskolski as saying.
The head of Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau, Cheng Ming-dean, had posted photos of the inflatable then on his Facebook page. He told local news media in February that the balloon spotted in September 2021 resembled the one seen in US airspace.
He also said a similar balloon was spotted in March last year over Taipei’s Songshan Airport. “They did not match the description of a standard meteorological balloon,” Cheng said, suggesting that they might have been spy balloons.
Already tense US-China relations were rocked by the controversy over the alleged spy balloon, which was later shot down by the US military. It also prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his Beijing trip which was then days away. Only when his visit materialised last week did the two sides show any signs of a thaw.
