Suspected drones flew over outlying Taiwanese islands and hackers attacked its defence ministry website, authorities in Taipei said on Thursday, a day (Aug 4) after a visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi that outraged China, Reuters reported.
Taiwan has been on alert as China conducts a series of military exercises in response to a visit to the island this week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, some of which were to take place within the island’s 12-nautical-mile sea and air territory, according to the defence ministry in Taipei.
That has never happened before and a senior ministry official described the potential move as “amounting to a sea and air blockade of Taiwan”.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said on Thursday its differences with the self-ruled island were an internal affair.
“Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful,” the Beijing-based Taiwan Affairs Office said.
China’s Xinhua news agency has said the exercises, involving live fire drills, will take place in six areas which ring Taiwan and will begin at noon (0400 GMT).
On Wednesday night, just hours after Pelosi left for South Korea, unidentified aircraft, probably drones, had flown above the area of the Kinmen islands, Taiwan’s defence ministry said.
Major General Chang Zone-sung of the Army’s Kinmen Defence Command told Reuters that the Chinese drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at around 9pm and 10pm.
“We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that’s why we dispersed them,” he said.
The heavily fortified Kinmen islands are just off the southeastern coast of China, near the city of Xiamen.
“We have a standard operating procedure. We will react if they come in,” Mr Chang said, adding that the alert level there remained “normal”.
He said he believed the drones were intended to gather intelligence on Taiwan’s security deployment in its outlying islands.
Last week, Taiwan’s military fired flares to warn away a drone that “glanced” at its Matsu archipelago off the coast of China’s Fujian province and was possibly probing its defences, Taiwan’s defence ministry said.
The first Taiwan Strait crisis broke out in 1954 when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists placed thousands of troops on the Taiwan-ruled Kinmen and Matsu islands, according to Reuters.
China, then led by Mao Zedong, responded with artillery bombardments of the islands.
Beijing's forces would intermittently shell Kinmen until a stalemate in 1979, in attempts to dislodge the Nationalist forces there.
Taiwan's defence ministry also said on Thursday that its website suffered cyber attacks and went offline temporarily, adding it was working closely with other authorities to enhance cyber security as tensions with China rise.
Earlier this week, several government websites, including the presidential office, were subject to overseas cyber attacks,some of which authorities said were launched by China and Russia.
Pelosi, the highest-level US visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover, adding that Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there.
China summoned the US ambassador in Beijing and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan.
Security in the area around the US Embassy in Beijing remained unusually tight on Thursday as it has been throughout this week.
Although Chinese social media users have vented fury on Pelosi, there were no signs of significant protests or calls to boycott US products.
After Pelosi's departure on Wednesday, Taiwan's defence ministry announced that 27 Chinese warplanes had entered the island's air defence identification zone (ADIZ).
Over the last two years, Beijing has ramped up military incursions into Taiwan's ADIZ - which is not the same as the island's territorial airspace, but includes a far greater area, Reuters reported.
The ministry published a map that showed 16 Su-30s and 6 J-11s had crossed the so-called "median line" of the Taiwan Strait - an unofficial boundary in the narrow waterway, which separates the island from the mainland and straddles vital shipping lanes.
