A Mysterious Silence In Taiwan Skies Ahead Of Trump's China Visit

Taiwan's military has grown used to a near-constant drumbeat of Chinese warplanes flying close by as part of Beijing's pressure campaign against the island nation it claims as its own. But for nearly two weeks, officials in Taipei have not detected even a single aircraft, leaving experts puzzled over the reasons for the dramatic reduction in sorties.

Beginning February 27, Taipei recorded 13 consecutive days of peace, barring a brief exception on March 6, when two aircraft were detected in the southwestern corner of Taiwan's air defence identification zone. But the spell was broken on Thursday after at least five People's Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft were detected flying around the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan's military said planes were seen flying near the median line that divides the waterway.

The near two-week pause in Beijing's air activity was the longest since Taipei began publicly releasing daily military data, according to a report by CNN.

“This is frankly unlike anything we've seen in recent history in terms of PLA activity around Taiwan,” Ben Lewis, the founder of PLATracker, a website that collates the data from the Taiwanese defence ministry, told CNN.

“Since Taiwan's defense ministry began releasing this data in 2020, the trend has been up, up, up...And now this lull, which maybe has ended today, maybe not, represents a very significant change in the pattern," he said.

China's Taiwan Claim

China claims Taiwan is part of its territory and has threatened to use force to bring the island under its control. In recent years, Beijing has stepped up military pressure on Taiwan, deploying fighter jets and warships around the island on a near-daily basis.

Sudden lulls in Chinese air activity near Taiwan are not new, including during China's weeklong annual legislative session, which ended on Thursday. But PLATracker data from past years showed that there was still usually a smattering of flights at that time of year.

Lewis noted that the fall was all the more striking against the buildup of Chinese military flights over recent years. Taiwan recorded about 10 Chinese military flights a day on average last year, and on some days the number went up to dozens.

According to an AFP report, Chinese military sorties around Taiwan also fell by around 42 per cent in January and February compared with the same period last year. The number of warships was about 4.5 per cent lower than a year ago.

Possible Reasons For Shortfall

Experts have been speculating about possible reasons for the sharp drop in Chinese aircraft deployments, with possibilities ranging from China's annual political gathering in Beijing, known as the "two sessions," that ended on Thursday, to its recent military purges.

Other reasons include US President Donald Trump's scheduled trip to Beijing later this month to meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and the Middle East conflict. China may be trying to conserve fuel amid the global oil crisis due to the US-Israeli war against Iran.

"I didn't expect to be worried about the cessation of PLA operations around Taiwan, but the lack of a rational explanation is disconcerting," Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, wrote on Substack.

Su Tzu-yun, a military expert at Taipei's Institute for National Defence and Security Research, surmised Beijing might be trying to "weaken public support" for Taiwan's plans to increase its defence spending.

Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te has proposed $40 billion in extra defence spending by his government over eight years, but the plan has been blocked by the opposition-controlled parliament.

China Planning Military Action?

Taipei is also worried that Beijing is deliberately reducing tensions as a prelude to military action.

A Taiwanese security official told AFP that Beijing may be trying to "create a false impression that China is easing its threats against Taiwan in order to deceive the US into reducing its support for Taiwan's security".

"We must not let our guard down," the official said.

But other analysts were not surprised by the easing of aircraft activity.

"PLA air incursions into Taiwan's ADIZ drop to/near zero around the time of the annual 'two sessions' every year," Brian Hart, deputy director and fellow of the China Power Project at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, wrote on X.

"If this pattern persists well beyond the two sessions, then it would be unusual. But I don't think there's evidence of anything unusual yet."