China flew 39 warplanes toward Taiwan Sunday night in its largest such attack in 2022 in an act of intimidating Taiwan
The activity has generally been in the air space southwest of Taiwan and falls into what Taiwan’s military calls the air defense identification zone, or air space it surveys out of national security considerations.
Taiwan and China split during a civil war in 1949, but China declares the island as its own territory. As a result, Beijing resists any action that would recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country and has used diplomatic and military means to isolate and intimidate Taiwan continuing a pattern that the island has responded by flying its own jets in response.
The activity on Sunday night included 24 J-16 fighter jets and 10 J-10 jets, among other support aircraft and electronic warfare aircraft, according to Taiwan’s defense ministry.
Taiwan’s air force ran its own jets and tracked the People’s Liberation Army planes on its air defense radar systems, the defense ministry said. Chinese pilots have been flying towards Taiwan on a near-daily basis in the past year and a half since Taiwan’s government started broadcasting the data regularly. The largest sortie was 56 warplanes on a single day last October.
Apprehensions have been heightened since Taiwanese citizens elected Tsai Ing-wen as president in 2016, to which Beijing responded by cutting off previously established communications with the island’s government. Tsai’s predecessor was friendly to China and had endorsed Beijing’s claim that the two are part of a single Chinese nation.