BEIJING, June 27US officials expressing a desire to turn the Taiwan Strait into hell should prepare to go there first, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said.
Earlier, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Samuel Paparo, said that the United States would protect Taiwan from a possible military operation by mainland China by deploying thousands of unmanned ships in the Taiwan Strait. He has indicated that he wants to turn the Taiwan Strait into a «drone hell» using a range of classified capabilities. 
«Those who shout that they want to turn others' homes into hell should first prepare to go to hell themselves. Some people in the U.S. are absolutely out of their minds to turn the Taiwan Strait into hell on earth in order to contain China through the Taiwan issue,» Wu Qian said at a briefing on Thursday.
The People's Liberation Army has always had the courage to fight hard and win in safeguarding its sovereignty and territorial integrity and opposing external interference, he said.
“We will never give in to threats and intimidation from some people,” Wu Qian emphasized.
The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit as US support for Taiwanese separatism and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of China 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. » media-type=»ar16x9″ data-crop-ratio=»0.5625″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»338″ data-source-sid=»ap_photo» title=»A man passes by flags of Taiwan in Taipei» class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»1080″ decoding=»async» />