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China Sends Aircraft Carrier Into Taiwan Strait

Photo

China’s lone aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with accompanying ships during a drill in the South China Sea in December. Credit China Stringer Network, via Reuters

HONG KONG — China sent its sole aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday morning, Taiwan officials said, a defiant move that signals China’s growing naval strength and may foreshadow an early foreign policy challenge for President-elect Donald J. Trump when he takes office in nine days.

The transit of the aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which had been conducting exercises in the South China Sea, comes amid rising tensions between Taiwan and China, and after Mr. Trump broke decades of protocol by speaking on the phone with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, after his election victory. Ms. Tsai leads a political party that has traditionally supported Taiwan’s formal independence from China.

“It’s a show of force, and I think it is intended in part to intimidate, and that’s worrisome from the U.S. and Taiwan’s point of view because we don’t know how much more they are going to ratchet up these pressures and tensions,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If the Trump administration does see this as a test of U.S. resolve, I suspect they’ll push back pretty forcefully.”

Taiwan scrambled F-16 fighter jets and a P-3C anti-submarine plane in response, and its navy dispatched a frigate to monitor the Liaoning’s movement, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported. Ms. Tsai, who is visiting Nicaragua, made two calls to Taiwan seeking updates on the Liaoning’s transit, the Central News Agency reported, citing Alex Huang, the president’s spokesman.

China was using the aircraft carrier to send a symbolic warning to both Taiwan and the incoming Trump administration, said Ni Lexiong, a naval affairs researcher at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.

“It’s all connected,” Mr. Ni said in a telephone interview. “Since Trump won the election, his words and actions have touched China’s bottom line. I think this was directed at America and the Taiwanese authorities. The aircraft carrier was on training exercises after all, but on the other hand, choosing this route to return was a response to their provocations.”

But Ms. Glaser said the action could have been planned well in advance as part of the vessel’s exercises in the South China Sea.

Liu Zhenmin, a Chinese vice foreign minister, said on Wednesday that the Taiwan Strait was an international waterway and that it was normal for the Liaoning to pass though it. The passage would not have any effect on cross-strait relations, he said in remarks carried in the Chinese news media.

Mark C. Toner, a State Department spokesman, told reporters in Washington in response to a question about the Liaoning’s passage through the strait that the United States “wouldn’t have a problem” with countries sailing their vessels in international waters so long as it was done in accordance with international law.

It also was not the first time the Liaoning had sailed through the strait: It passed through in November 2013 on its way to the South China Sea after having been commissioned only the year before.

In that instance, the carrier kept to the western half of the strait, closer to mainland China. In a statement on Wednesday morning, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said that the Liaoning was also staying to the west of the strait’s middle and urged citizens to remain calm. A transit on the eastern side, closer to Taiwan, would be viewed as much more provocative.

Taiwan, considered by Beijing to be Chinese territory, has been ruled separately since 1949, when the defeated forces of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island following their defeat on the mainland by the Communists. China views any assertion of Taiwan’s separateness from the mainland, such as Ms. Tsai’s call with Mr. Trump, as an affront to its claim of sovereignty.

Since 1979, the United States has recognized the government in Beijing and broke off formal diplomatic ties to Taiwan as part of the One China policy. In the wake of the Trump-Tsai phone call, China warned the incoming president against making changes to that policy after he takes office on Jan. 20.

Euan Graham, the director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, said that for the Chinese, traveling through the strait was a logical way to move from one area of fleet operations to another along its long coastline. In order for warships based in northern ports, like the Liaoning, to return home from southern waters, they must either pass close to Japanese islands or transit the Taiwan Strait. “Geography forces a very binary choice,” he said.

Mr. Graham said it was important to see how the Liaoning conducted its passage. If it had aircraft on deck and was conducting flight operations, that would be seen as more provocative than if it passed through the strait with the aircraft in its hangar bay, he said.

The Liaoning, commissioned in 2012 and built from a Soviet hull, is China’s first aircraft carrier. In past decades, the United States has shown its resolve to defend Taiwan by sailing carriers through the Taiwan Strait. In 1995, the aircraft carrier Nimitz transited the strait amid heightened tensions after Beijing conducted missile tests in the waters.

China’s military decision-making is highly secretive, but it would seem inconceivable for the Liaoning to pass through such contested waters without approval from the president, Xi Jinping, who is also the chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the military. And the Chinese military media has described the aircraft carrier as embodying Mr. Xi’s plans for a stronger navy, capable of projecting force far beyond China’s territorial waters.

Last Thursday, the front page of People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese military, featured a report about the aircraft carrier’s latest journey under the headline, “We’re sailing under the leader’s attentive gaze,” a clear tribute to Mr. Xi.

Although the passage of the Liaoning sent an emphatic political message, China’s aircraft carrier program is still in its fledgling stage.

The Liaoning, refashioned from an unfinished hull bought from Ukraine, displaces about 60,000 tons. That is much smaller than the American Navy’s Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which have a displacement of 97,000 tons.

In contrast with China’s one carrier, the American Navy has 10 operational aircraft carriers and one more, the Gerald R. Ford, which will soon be commissioned.

China is building a second aircraft carrier in Dalian, a northeastern port city, and experts estimate that the second carrier, similar in design to the Liaoning but perhaps a bit larger, will be ready to launch this year or next. After that, the Chinese Navy appears likely to start building larger carriers.

Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, said in a news conference on Wednesday that the Liaoning’s passage was part of the ship’s scheduled training in the western Pacific, which had begun on Dec. 24.

Mr. Ma also said that the Taiwan-China relationship in the coming year would face “increasing uncertainty, looming risks and challenges.”

He added that Taiwan’s government and “independence forces” there had “seriously threatened the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait,” accusing them of engaging in separatist activities and warning that China would “resolutely safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The aircraft carrier’s passage was part of a cluster of recent acts by the Chinese military that have raised regional hackles.

Last month, a Chinese warship seized an underwater drone belonging to the United States Navy about 50 miles northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines. The drone was returned after the Obama administration publicly chided China over the seizure. On Monday, Japan said it had sent fighter jets into the air after Chinese bombers and surveillance planes flew over the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan.

“When China was militarily weaker, Japan considered that area to be its backyard,” said Mr. Ni, the naval researcher. “This was a way of telling Japan that if there ever is conflict, the location of any future battle space won’t be decided by you and America. We have the initiative. So Japan, don’t think of meddling further afield in Taiwan or the South China Sea.”