China’s military has sent aircraft and warships to probe Taiwan’s defenses for a second day, escalating a crisis that has prompted one of the island’s richest men to donate millions of dollars to its security.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said Friday that multiple groups of Chinese warplanes and warships had operated in the Taiwan Strait area by 11:00 a.m., including on the Taiwan side of the median line, an unofficial division of the strait. withdrawn from the US decades ago to sit. the risk of conflict.
Robert Tsao, founder of contract chip maker United Microelectronics Corp, announced he was donating NT$3 billion ($100 million) to Taiwan’s defense.
“With the Chinese Communist Party acting so despotically towards Taiwan, maybe they think Taiwanese are all afraid of death and greedy for money?” he said at a heated press conference. “But I hope. . . we stand up and fight to defend freedom, democracy and human rights”.
Tsao previously told Taiwanese media that his two sons would return to the country if China invades. His latest comments were the strongest from a high-profile tycoon in Taiwan’s tech equipment sector since military exercises began this week.
Last week, Mark Liu, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s leading maker of high-end chips, told CNN that “no one can control TSMC by force.”
China’s unprecedented live-fire war games, which have sparked the biggest cross-border crisis since the 1990s, were launched this week to punish Taiwan for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the country.
China’s Foreign Ministry said Friday afternoon that it would impose sanctions against Pelosi and members of her immediate family.
“The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, insisted on going to Taiwan despite China’s serious concerns and strong opposition. This. . . severely violates the “one China” principle, the ministry said, without specifying the scope of the fines.
On the final stop of her five-nation tour, Pelosi met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who condemned China’s missile launches and called for an immediate end to military exercises.
Pelosi told a news conference that while the visit to Taiwan was not intended to change the status quo, it took place against a backdrop of China’s repeated efforts to isolate Taiwan from the rest of the world.
Pelosi and Kishida spoke hours after China fired ballistic missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone for the first time.
Official Chinese media, meanwhile, tried to drum up support for the drills after an international backlash. An op-ed in the military newspaper PLA Daily said the drills were aimed at “prevention” as Taiwan and the US joined forces to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, an echo of Beijing’s insistence that Washington was ultimately responsible for provoking the Russian invasion. of Ukraine in February.
Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the National Defense University in Beijing, claimed that a US aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, had been forced to retreat several hundred kilometers after the People’s Liberation Army set up a firing range east of Taiwan.
Pelosi’s trip through Asia has also highlighted the diplomatic problem for regional leaders caught in the tussle between the world’s two largest economies. On Thursday, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declined to meet with Pelosi during her visit to Seoul as his administration comes under growing Chinese pressure over its trade and defense ties with the US.
The apparent nonchalance was cheered by Chinese media and netizens. “Pelosi does not appear to be popular in Seoul,” wrote the Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times.
Additional reporting by Maiqi Ding in Beijing and Tom Mitchell in Singapore
