Far East Watch

China’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has sailed through the Taiwan Strait, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry

TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s newest and most powerful of its three aircraft carriers sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, the Taiwanese defense ministry said, a day after Taiwan began a five-day military exercise on responding to a Chinese attack.

The Fujian carrier first sailed through the narrow body of water separating China and Taiwan in a trial run last September. It later transited the strait for the first time as a fully commissioned military vessel in December.

Taiwan may feel distant to most Europeans, but a Chinese takeover of the island would send shockwaves from Washington to Tokyo, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister François Chih-chung Wu told Euronews Next.

“If China attacks Taiwan, France, Europe, the United States, and Japan will all be affected. Taiwan will be in a terrible situation — but so will you,” he warned.

The deputy minister pushed back on China’s claim over Taiwan as part of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing has never ruled out using force to bring the self-governing island under its control and refuses to recognise it as a sovereign state, insisting it be referred to internationally as “Chinese Taipei,” a designation that reflects China’s position that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is part of it.

Taiwan itself officially goes by the Republic of China, a name dating back to the government that fled to the island after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.

Taiwan’s history is far more complex than the narrative that it has always been part of China, Wu said, with the island ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Qing Empire and Japan at different times.

The Qing Dynasty administered part of Taiwan for more than a hundred years, but it was only between 1885 and 1894 that it attached any real importance to the island and established it as a province — a mere ten years of genuine strategic interest that challenges the current Chinese claims of continued sovereignty.

“China was not the only country there,” he said, arguing this history does not justify Beijing’s ambitions.