Beijing: China on Monday began military exercises Joint Sword-2024B around Taiwan to practice jointly assaulting, blocking and taking control of key ports and areas of the island, Naval Sen. Capt. Li Xi, spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theatre Command, said on Monday.
“The PLA Eastern Theatre Command sent its ground forces, naval and air forces, missile and other troops to conduct the Joint Sword-2024B exercises in the Taiwan Strait, in areas north, south and east of Taiwan Island on October 14,” Li Xi said in a statement published on the website of the Chinese Defense Ministry.
It is noted that during the military exercises, PLA ships and aircraft are approaching Taiwan from different directions, and various forces will conduct joint assault maneuvers, “focusing on joint patrols of the Navy and Air Force, blocking and taking control of key ports and areas, striking sea and land targets, and seizing comprehensive control.”
It is indicated that the purpose of the exercise is to test the combat capability of the Eastern Theatre Command forces to conduct joint military operations.
The situation around Taiwan has become significantly more tense after Nancy Pelosi, then-US House Speaker, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing in this step the United States’ support for Taiwanese separatism, and conducted large-scale military exercises.
Formal relations between China’s central government and its island province were severed in 1949 after Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces, 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 early 1990s, the two sides have been in contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing-based Association for the Development of Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
