Taiwan: rare sighting of mainland Chinese helicopter points to test of island defences
Taipei said 19 aircraft, including the two helicopters, had entered the island’s air-defence identification zone to the north, east and southwest.
Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said the helicopter operating east of the self-ruled island was likely to be shipborne.
“It is common practice [that] if you have a warship out there and you’re on anti-submarine warfare duty, you will usually send a helicopter on its way,” he said.
The helicopter could be coordinating with the mother warship or other navy surface forces, or the ship’s sonar had “picked up something and then you dispatch your helicopter to check it out”, he said.
Ultimately, the operation appeared to be aimed at “testing Taiwanese defences”, he said.
He said the development was not surprising because in recent times “the PLA Navy is starting to train much more intensely in anti-submarine warfare”.
Song Zhongping, a former PLA instructor, said the main tasks of PLA helicopters included finding, tracking and deterring submarines, as well as carrying out surveillance and rescue operations.
Song said that without seeing an image of the helicopter, it was not certain whether it belonged to the mainland’s military or coastguard.
Koh, however, said it was not likely to be a coastguard helicopter because coastguard vessels, such as the Type 056 corvette, did not have on-board facilities to hold the helicopter and were not usually found on the northern and eastern seaboard of Taiwan.
Koh also said the five consecutive days of helicopter activity last week was “unusual”.
“It could mean, for example, an ongoing Chinese exercise that involves anti-submarine warfare … which requires the helicopter to fly that intensely over consecutive days,” he said.
“The other possibility is that there could be some pretty interesting underwater contact that they are trying to pursue and they are trying to localise and track. So, there are many possibilities.”
Military manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait have become more sensitive as tension between Beijing and Taipei rises.
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Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait and the airspace as its own, as it considers the self-ruled island part of China and has not renounced the use of force to bring it under its control.
Most countries do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but its main international backer the United States is opposed to any attempt to take the island by force.