China completes military drills near Taiwan
China's People's Liberation Army said Wednesday that it “successfully completed” two days of military exercises in the waters off Taiwan, concluding a set of high-powered maneuvers aimed at asserting its sovereignty over the island — actions that ratcheted up tension in East Asia during 2025's waning days.
In a New Year's Eve announcement, the PLA said that the operation it called “Justice Mission 2025” had “fully tested the integrated joint operations capabilities of its troops,” News.Az reports, citing ABC News.
“Always on high alert, the troops of the Theater Command will keep strengthening combat readiness with arduous training, resolutely thwart the attempts of ‘Taiwan Independence’ separatists and external intervention, and firmly safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Senior Capt. Li Xi, spokesperson for the PLA's Eastern Theater Command, was quoted as saying.
The brief announcement, presented on video accompanied by rousing martial music, offered no details about what constituted success, nor did it specify exactly when the exercises concluded. An earlier announcement had said they would take place during the day Monday and Tuesday, but it was unclear if any lingering drills had continued into Wednesday around Taiwan.
Taiwan has long been China's most sensitive issue when it comes to the international community.
Beijing has long insisted the island is its sovereign territory and has promised to retake it by force if necessary. The self-governing island split from the mainland in 1949 after Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists retreated there upon losing a civil war with Mao Zedong's communists. That communist government has ruled the rest of China ever since.
Beijing sends warplanes and navy vessels toward the island on a near-daily basis, and in recent years it has stepped up the scope and scale of the exercises.
Chinese President Xi Jinping also weighed in Wednesday, albeit obliquely, making a brief reference to the Taiwan situation in an annual New Year’s Eve speech to the nation. He said Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share “a bond of blood and kinship.”
“The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable,” Xi said.
This week's military maneuvers were received in many corners as inflammatory, and China itself acknowledged they were designed to send a message to “external forces” — in short, anyone who might come between its government and the island it prizes.
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