China's military carried out aerial and naval blockade drills around Taiwan on Monday, its last scheduled day of exercises, as the US Navy said it sailed a guided-missile destroyer through waters claimed by Beijing.
The war games follow a meeting last week between Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy outside Los Angeles, an encounter Beijing had warned would provoke a furious response.
China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under Beijing's control. Taiwan's government strongly disputes China's claims and has denounced the three-day drills.
Chinese state television said aircraft, including nuclear-capable H-6 bombers armed with live missiles, and warships staged drills to "form a multi-directional island-encompassing blockade situation".
"In the Taiwan Strait, the northwest and southwest of Taiwan and the waters east of Taiwan (Chinese forces) took the initiative to attack, giving full play to their performance advantages, flexibly manoeuvring to seize favourable positions, and advancing at high speed to deter opponents," the report said.
The Eastern Theatre Command of the People's Liberation Army said the Shandong aircraft carrier also took part in the simulated "sealing off" of Taiwan, and showed fighters taking off from its deck.
Taipei's defence ministry said it spotted 59 military planes and 11 ships near Taiwan. The ministry said that, among them, 39 Chinese planes crossed the Taiwan Strait median line and entered Taiwan's air defence zones.
Also on Monday, the US Navy said its guided-missile destroyer the USS Milius sailed through waters claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea in a "freedom of navigation" operation.
"This freedom of navigation operation upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea," the Navy said in a statement, adding that the ship had passed near the Spratly Islands.
The USS Milius sailed about 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) away from the location where Chinese fighter jets and warships were carrying out a third day of military drills around Taiwan.
China warns Taiwan independence, peace 'mutually exclusive'
The deployment of the Milius immediately triggered more anger from China, which said the vessel had "illegally intruded" into its territorial waters.
Beijing warned on Monday that Taiwan independence and cross-strait peace were "mutually exclusive", blaming Taipei and unnamed "foreign forces" for stoking tensions.
"If we want to protect peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait we must firmly oppose any form of Taiwan independence separatism," China's foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular briefing.
"In the near future, China wants to make it clear it has the military capacity to be able to launch a blockade, or even possibly an invasion, of Taiwan," said Rana Mitter, a professor of history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford.
"The reason it wants to signal this is not because it actually wants to make a military assault its first priority, but rather to try to force political talks along lines preferable to Beijing," he added.
Taiwan's military has repeatedly said it will respond calmly to China's drills and not provoke conflict.
The Taiwanese defence ministry released pictures on Monday of mobile launchers for the Taiwan-made Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles at an undisclosed location, as well as missile-armed fast attack boats at sea.
Japanese officials said China's Shandong carrier group conducted air operations in waters close to Japan's Okinawan islands on Sunday, adding that it was following the military drills around Taiwan "with great interest".
Japan has long worried about China's military activities in the area given how close southern Japanese islands are to Taiwan.
The southern Japanese island of Okinawa hosts a major US air force base, and last August when China staged war games to protest the visit of then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei, Chinese missiles landed within Japan's exclusive economic zone.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, Reuters)
