"The purpose is to show that the PLA is capable of controlling all the exits of the Taiwan Island, which will be a great deterrent to 'Taiwan independence' secessionist forces," said Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at China's Naval Research Institute. Military analysts told Beijing's state broadcaster CCTV that the goal was to practice a possible blockade of the island and contain its pro-independence forces. "In the face of this blatant provocation, we have to take legitimate and necessary countermeasures to safeguard the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing Thursday. Beijing has defended the drills as "necessary and just", pinning the blame for the escalation on the United States and its allies. Beijing has said the drills will last until midday on Sunday. On the mainland, at what is said to be China's closest point to Taiwan, AFP saw a batch of five military helicopters flying at a relatively low altitude near a popular tourist spot. 'Necessary and just' - AFP journalists on the border island of Pingtan saw several small projectiles flying into the sky followed by plumes of white smoke and loud booming sounds. Taipei's defence ministry said it had detected 22 Chinese fighter jets briefly crossing the Taiwan Strait's "median line" during Thursday's exercises. Tokyo has lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing over the exercises, with Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi saying five of the missiles were believed to have landed in his country's exclusive economic zone. But Japan, a key US ally, said that of the nine missiles it had detected, four were "believed to have flown over Taiwan's main island".
Taipei did not say where the missiles landed or whether they flew over the island. Taiwan said the Chinese military fired 11 Dongfeng-class ballistic missiles "in several batches" and condemned the exercises as "irrational actions that undermine regional peace". The drills began around 12 noon local time (0400 GMT), and involved a "conventional missile firepower assault" in waters to the east of Taiwan, the Chinese military said. "The temperature's pretty high," but tensions "can come down very easily by just having the Chinese stop these very aggressive military drills," he added. "China has chosen to overreact and use the speaker's visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait," White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
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In retaliation, China launched a series of exercises in multiple zones around Taiwan, straddling some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and at some points just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the island's shore.
The US House speaker was the highest-profile US official to visit Taiwan in years, defying a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory. The United States on Thursday condemned China's launch of 11 ballistic missiles around Taiwan during major military drills as an overreaction to Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, urging Beijing to decrease tensions.
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