Taiwan carried out military drills Wednesday with naval chiefs assuring residents the island is safe, as concerns grow that tensions will escalate with China after recent presidential elections.
Taiwan carried out military drills Wednesday with naval chiefs assuring residents the island is safe, as concerns grow that tensions will escalate with China after recent presidential elections.
The drills were the first since Tsai Ing-wen of the China-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to victory in the elections earlier this month.
On Wednesday, the Taiwanese navy displayed eight warships and fired flares from a missile corvette during an exercise in waters off Tsoying in southern Taiwan, home to the island's naval headquarters.
It was the second and final day of the drills which saw a group of elite frogmen land on a beach in motorboats Tuesday on the island of Kinmen - a Taiwan-controlled outpost island near China's southeastern Xiamen city.
A fleet of F-16 fighter jets were also scrambled in another exercise Tuesday at the southern Chiayi airbase.
"With the Lunar New Year approaching, our citizens can feel at ease we are able to maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait," Vice Admiral Tsai Hung-tu, head of the navy's political warfare office, told AFP.
Military exercises are routinely carried out by Taiwan before the Lunar New Year holidays which fall in February this year.
China's state-controlled CCTV last week released footage it claimed depicted a drill recently carried out by Chinese forces, off the southeast coast of the mainland, near Taiwan.
Taiwan's defense ministry dismissed the footage, saying the images were collated from past maneuvers.
A Taiwanese defense ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity told AFP that the move was part of Beijing's "psychological warfare" against Taiwan.
China has 1,500 missiles trained on Taiwan, according to the island's defense ministry.
China fired test missiles into the Taiwan Strait in a bid to deter voters in the island's first democratic elections in 1996.
