BEIJING, Nov. 2 The PRC Armed Forces organized escorting US and Canadian warships in the Taiwan Strait, Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Combat Command spokesman Shi Yi said on Thursday.
Shi Yi said that on November 1, the American destroyer USS Rafael Peralta and the Canadian frigate HMCS Ottawa passed through the Taiwan Strait.
“The PLA Eastern Combat Command Zone has organized naval and air forces to escort and monitor (ships) along the entire route in accordance with law and regulations,” Shi Yi said in a statement published in official account of the Eastern Zone Combat Command of the PLA on the WeChat social network.
He stressed that the troops of the PLA Eastern Combat Command Zone are always in a state of heightened combat readiness, resolutely defending national sovereignty and security, as well as regional peace and stability.
The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after the visit of then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to the island in early August last year. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit, seeing in this step US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.