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       TAIPEI: China is deploying its largest navy fleet in regional waters in nearly three decades, posing a threat to Taiwan that is more pronounced than previous Chinese war games, the Taiwanese defence ministry alleged on Tuesday.

       Speaking in Taipei, defence ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said the scale of the current Chinese naval deployment in an area running from the southern Japanese islands down into the South China Sea was the largest since China held war games around Taiwan ahead of 1996 Taiwanese presidential elections.

       China’s military has yet to comment and has not confirmed it is carrying out any exercises.

       “The current scale is the largest compared to the previous four,” Sun said.

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       “Regardless of whether they have announced drills, they are posing a great threat to us,” according to the spokesperson.

       Senior ministry intelligence officer Hsieh Jih-sheng told the same press conference there have so far been no live fire drills in China’s seven “reserved” air space zones, two of which are in the Taiwan Strait, but there had been a significant increase in Chinese activity to the north of Taiwan over the last day.

       The number of China navy and coast guard ships in the region, which a Taiwan security source said remained at around 90, was “very alarming”, and China was taking aim at other countries in the region and not only Taiwan, he alleged.

       China’s deployment in the First Island Chain — which runs from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas — is aimed at area denial to prevent foreign forces from interfering, Hsieh alleged.

       Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2024