Dozens of Chinese warplanes and navy vessels tracked near Taiwan coast on second day of drills

Taipei: Taiwan tracked dozens of Chinese warplanes and navy vessels off its coast Friday on the second day of a large exercise China’s People’s Liberation Army held in response to the island’s new leadership.

The defence ministry said it tracked 49 warplanes and 19 navy vessels, as well as Chinese coast guard vessels, and that 35 of the planes flew across the median of the Taiwan Strait, the de facto boundary between the sides, over a 24-hour period from Thursday to Friday.

“Facing external challenges and threats, we will continue to maintain the values of freedom and democracy,” Taiwan’s new President Lai Ching-te told sailors and top security officials Thursday as he visited a marine base in Taoyuan, just south of the capital, Taipei.

In his inauguration speech Monday, Lai had called on Beijing to stop its military intimidation and said Taiwan was “a sovereign independent nation in which sovereignty lies in the hands of the people.”China’s military said its two-day exercises around Taiwan were punishment for separatist forces seeking independence. It sends navy ships and warplanes into the Taiwan Strait and other areas around the island almost daily to wear down Taiwan’s defenses and seek to intimidate its people, who firmly back their de facto independence.

“As soon as the leader of Taiwan took office, he challenged the one-China principle and blatantly sold the two-state theory’,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Chen Binhua said in a statement Thursday night.

The one-China principle asserts that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China under Communist Party rule. Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade province and has been upping its threats to annex it by force if necessary.