Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said today that Taipei has not detected any spy balloons from China so far, amid concerns in the region over the crisis sparked between Washington and Beijing in about these devices.
General Huang Wen-chi of Taiwan’s military ministry told a press conference today that the Chinese balloons the island detects are “weather-based”, with incursions “every year”, but that they “don’t do not constitute a threat to security”. Taiwanese agency CNA.
On Monday, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources, that “Chinese military balloons” have flown over Taiwan’s airspace in recent years.
Huang said on Thursday that he could not disclose the number of incursions detected “to avoid revealing our intelligence gathering sources”, but that the figure is in any case consistent with “the number of weather balloons (China) sent every year”.
According to Huang, the Taiwanese military does not believe that any of these balloons pose a serious threat, “but we will shoot them down if we find out that they are,” he said, CNA reported.
The United States shot down a Chinese balloon on February 4 that was allegedly spying on their territory, and since then they have shot down three other flying machines in North America whose origin they have not yet been able to identify.
Joe Biden’s government has accused China of developing a military spy program using balloons sent to 40 countries on five continents, for which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to Beijing.
As the American newspaper The Washington Post published last week, the balloons would have operated for several years from the Chinese province of Hainan to collect information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest for the China, especially Japan, India, Vietnam. , Taiwan and the Philippines.
For its part, the Chinese government assured that the first object shot down was a weather balloon which deviated from its trajectory and denounced that at least ten American balloons flew over China last year.
China claims for itself the sovereignty of the autonomous island of Taiwan, which it considers a rebel province for the reunification of which it does not exclude the use of force.
The island is also one of the biggest sources of conflict between China and the United States, mainly because Washington is Taiwan’s main arms supplier and its main ally in the event of a war with Beijing.