A Chinese military drone circled the airspace around Taiwan over the weekend in a pointed maneuver just hours before the island began its largest-ever war games to practise fighting off an amphibious invasion.
Early on Monday, Taiwanese air force fighter jets, including F-16V Fighting Falcons, left the island’s western air bases for aircraft shelters on the east coast, facing the Philippine Sea, in a force preservation exercise ahead of a simulated saturation strike by China’s rocket forces.
China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own, despite Taipei’s repeated rejections. Each summer, the Taiwanese military holds its Han Kuang drills across the archipelago, integrating homemade and U.S.-supplied weapons systems, in case its Communist neighbor makes good on its invasion threat.
An unidentified unmanned aerial vehicle was among a dozen crewed and uncrewed Chinese aircraft, and at least seven Chinese warships, detected near Taiwan in the 24 hours to 6 a.m. local time on Tuesday, the Taiwanese defense ministry said in a daily report.
Newsweek’s map shows the drone’s flight path in bright red, entering Taiwan’s de facto air defense identification zone south of the Taiwan Strait’s median line, before looping around the island’s eastern shores, home to the closely guarded Chiashan Air Force Base and its subterranean hangars.
The sortie on Sunday was also detected by neighboring Japan, a longtime U.S. security treaty ally whose leaders are increasingly concerned about the potential far-reaching impact a Chinese attack on Taiwan could have on Japanese economic security.
The dark red line in Newsweek’s map roughly traces the UAV’s tracks between from the South to the East China seas, according to an estimate released by Japan’s Joint Staff Office, part its defense ministry, which said Japanese air force jets were scrambled to meet it near Japan’s own air defense zone.
An air defense zone, or ADIZ, is a self-declared buffer used to identify approaching aircraft. The area—also used by China, South Korea and the Philippines—does not constitute territorial airspace, which typically extends up to 12 nautical miles from the coast.
A Taiwan air force F-16V fighter aircraft prepares to depart an air base in western Taiwan on July 22. A Chinese military drone circled the airspace around Taiwan over the weekend.
Taiwan Military News Agency
The apparent double confirmation put the Chinese drone sortie in the so-called “Yonaguni gap,” the narrow waterway—less than 70 miles wide—separating Taiwan’s east coast from Japan’s western-most inhabited island of Yonaguni.
For at least 15 months, Yonaguni has hosted Patriot surface-to-air missile systems operated by Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, along with batteries on the neighboring islands of Ishigaki, Miyako, as well as Okinawa—home to around 30,000 U.S. troops.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said it dispatched combat air patrol aircraft, naval vessels and deployed coastal missile systems to monitor the Chinese military movements.
A ministry spokesperson declined to comment on any connection between the UAV flight and Taiwan’s Han Kuang exercise.
China’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its drone operation, which appeared to be a demonstration of the reach of Chinese air power.
“The latest drone flight around Taiwan is a direct response to the Hang Kuang exercise,” said Christina Chen, a security analyst at Taiwan’s top military think tank, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
“This year’s Hang Kuang emphasizes ‘unscripted’ drills that are close to actual combat, with the intention to test Taiwan’s ability to protect critical infrastructure in its capital, enhance the resilience of its key infrastructure nationwide, and to enhance troop sustainability in an event of a disruption of communication with the outside,” Chen told Newsweek.
“In other words, Hang Kuang is carried out with the latest Chinese drill in mind—to enhance Taiwan’s capability to endure a Chinese blockade,” she said, with Beijing’s maneuver meant to “tell Taiwan that such preparation is futile.”
The July 21 sortie was the first time this year, and the sixth time overall since April 2023, that a Chinese drone had circled Taiwan’s main island, according an X post by Ben Lewis, a Washington-based defense analyst and cofounder of PLATracker, a database that records Chinese People’s Liberation Army activity.
“It is almost certainly connected to Han Kuang,” Lewis told Newsweek. “China has ramped up its military activity leading into the exercises, but it is also possible that the UAV was doing reconnaissance on Han Kuang-related activities on the east side of Taiwan.”
Chinese aircraft have flown over 6,200 sorties in Taiwan’s air defense zone since the fall of 2020, including 325 sorties in June, the highest monthly total in over 20 months, the statistics show.
July’s figures are expected to surpass that, Lewis said.
Update, 7/23/24, 2:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional comments.
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