Taiwan’s defence ministry says it reserves right to shoot down Chinese balloons

Taiwan has the right to shoot down any Chinese balloons that posed “high security” threats, the country’s defence ministry said after a report cited officials saying such balloons “very frequently” breached the self-governed island’s airspace.

“The ministry has rules in terms of response and will continue revising the rules in a timely manner to respond to new threats such as balloons,” defence ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said.

“The military will adopt appropriate measures, including shooting threats down, according to the level of concern,” he told Bloomberg.

However, such measures have not been necessary so far, the defence ministry said, adding that it had not spotted any surveillance balloons from China, similar to the one downed by the US.

Washington shot down a Chinese “spy” balloon on 4 February off the coast of South Carolina after it traversed above sensitive military sites across North America, triggering a diplomatic spat.

Beijing has argued that the balloon was a civilian research craft that had mistakenly blown off course.

The majority of the balloons near Taiwan’s waters were used for meteorological purposes, major general Huang Wen-chi, a military intelligence officer, told reporters on Tuesday.

The balloons detected near Taiwan had no steering capability and thus were unlikely to be used for surveillance, he said.

Weather balloons were not a security threat, he added.

Mr Huang said they will not make public the exact number of incursions detected “to avoid giving away the sources of our intelligence gathering”. The number of balloons detected from China were reportedly in “accordance with the number of weather balloons it sends each year”.

The statement comes on the heels of a report in the Financial Times which cited unnamed military sources saying that dozens of Chinese balloons have crossed into Taiwanese airspace over the past years, with the latest incident being just a few weeks ago.

“They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago,” a senior Taiwanese official was quoted by the newspaper in the report published on Monday. Such incursions were happening on average once a month, the report stated.

Previously Taiwan had only confirmed the presence of Chinese balloons in an incident in February last year, when four batches of the aircraft were seen hovering over the island’s north.

China has beefed up its military aggression around Taiwan, including flying a record number of warplanes into its airspace, in an effort to exert its claim over the island.

China says Taiwan is a part of its national territory even though Taipei has been self-ruled after splitting from the mainland in 1949 following a civil war.