Taiwan shot down a drone over one of its outlying islands for the first time on Thursday, as Taipei begins to respond more forcefully to a sustained Chinese military pressure campaign.
Taiwan’s military said an unidentified commercial drone equipped with cameras entered restricted airspace over the waters around Shihyu, an islet controlled by Taiwan less than 4 km from Chinese territory.
“After warnings and attempts to expel him failed, [soldiers in] the garrison brought it down with defensive shots,” said the army command on Kinmen Island, which is about 20 km from the Chinese city of Xiamen.
Taiwan’s defense ministry declined to say whether the unmanned aerial vehicle was Chinese, but the incident follows a series of similar intrusions by civilian drone models into Kinmen airspace over the past two years weeks, all of them in the direction of Xiamen. On Tuesday, Taipei said it had shot down one of those drones to drive it out.
The crackdown on drones comes as Taiwan tries to show more determination to deter Chinese aircraft and warships from flying and sailing closer to its territory. Such Chinese activities have continued since Beijing conducted unprecedented week-long drills in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August.
Robert Tsao shows an enlarged copy of his Taiwanese ID on Thursday © Ritchie B Tongo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Earlier on Thursday, Robert Tsao, founder of United Microelectronics Corporation, Taiwan’s second-largest chipmaker, said he would donate NT$600 million ($19.6 million) to support a civil society initiative to train 3 million civilian fighters and NT$400 million to train 300,000 more. civilian shooters The donations were the first installments of $100 million that Tsao has pledged to bolster Taiwan’s defenses.
Tsao, 75, who has clashed with Taiwanese authorities in the past trying to circumvent restrictions on investment in China, has transformed over the past month into one of Beijing’s most outspoken critics.
After his $100 million pledge, Tsao renounced his Singaporean citizenship and restored his Taiwanese citizenship. In front of reporters wearing bulletproof vests on Thursday, he proudly displayed a Taiwanese identity card issued the previous day and said he did not want to die anywhere else.
Raging against the Chinese Communist Party’s claims that Taiwan has been part of China since ancient times, Tsao said the CCP was “suffering from a mental disorder.” He urged his compatriots to recognize the threat facing the country from the People’s Republic.
The Chinese military announced that its exercises around Taiwan were completed on August 10, but since then it has maintained air and naval activity at much higher levels and much closer to Taiwanese territory than before of the exercises.
According to data released by Taiwan’s defense ministry, People’s Liberation Army aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone 444 times in August, more than double the highest monthly figure since that Taipei began making these intrusions public two years ago.
China’s foreign ministry on Thursday referred requests for comment on the drone downing to the defense ministry, which had no immediate comment, Reuters reported. On Monday, the foreign ministry said Chinese drones flying over Chinese territory were “nothing to make a fuss about”.
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