BEJING, Dec 22 the approach to the island of 39 aircraft and three ships of the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA), follows from the daily report of the Taiwanese defense department.
«During the period from 06:00 on December 21 to 06:00 on December 22, 39 aircraft and three ships of the People's Liberation Army of China were detected around Taiwan,» the report says.
It is noted that 30 aircraft entered the island's air defense identification zone, including 21 J-16 fighters, a CH-4 drone, two KJ-500 AWACS aircraft, a Y-20 tanker aircraft, and a Z- multipurpose helicopter 9, as well as four H-6 strategic bombers.
Taiwan sent air and sea patrols to monitor the situation and deployed ground-based missile systems, the ministry said.
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after the visit to the island in early August of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit, seeing in this move US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of the People's Republic of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a 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 beginning of the 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 Foundation for Cross-Strait Exchanges.