For five years now, Beijing has made the deployment of its military forces around Taiwan an almost traditional tool of its international diplomacy, to respond to a "provocation", or at least one perceived as such, on the part of the autonomous island.
This was the case again on October 14. The Joint Sword 2024b exercise, the second of the year, mobilized 17 warships of the People's Liberation Army, including the aircraft carrier Liaoning, an air and naval force that carried out 125 air sorties in the air identification zone of the island, and land-based missile forces to, once again, simulate a naval and air blockade of Taiwan.
For Beijing, this was a vigorous protest against the speech of the new Taiwanese president, Lai Ching-Te, on October 10, during which he notably repeated that the island of Taiwan was not subordinate to the People's Republic of China, a speech with far too pro-independence overtones for Beijing and its leaders.
In this section:
Joint Sword exercises and the blockade of Taiwan, since Nancy Pelosi's visit
If the Chinese provocations around Taiwan Now dating back 5 years, these reached a major milestone in the summer of 2022, on the occasion of Nancy Pelosi's visit, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, on the self-ruled island, a snub to Beijing and its one-China policy, established with Washington in the early 70s.
This was negotiated to thwart and weaken the Soviet Union in Asia, while the United States emerged very weakened from the Vietnam War, against the recognition of the uniqueness of China, to the detriment of its Taiwanese ally, and of the rule of the nine traits, which today is at the heart of all tensions in the South China Sea, and that China had suffered heavy losses and a bitter military defeat, during the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1969.
If, until the early 2010s, the subject was very secondary, except when Beijing put pressure on Western countries, regarding the sale of military weapons to Taiwan. But with the arrival of Xi Jinping at the head of the People's Republic of China, tensions grew proportionally to the modernization of the forces of the People's Liberation Army.
To the point that at the end of the 2010s, after the reunification of Hong Kong showed that Beijing had no intention of respecting the rule of "one country, two regimes", relations between the two states quickly deteriorated, while the independence discourse on the autonomous island gained political momentum.
Washington, a formal ally of Taipei, could not remain indifferent to repeated requests for American support for this island which, moreover, holds strategic shares of the semiconductor market on a global scale, and which therefore holds the American, European and world economies in its hands.
In fact, starting in the late 2010s, the United States stepped up its military support for Taiwan, notably authorizing the sale of F-16V Block 70s, the most modern version of the American fighter, as well as various other defensive and offensive systems.
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