The Chinese Navy confirmed that the aircraft carrier formation of the Liaoning ship is conducting training in the waters surrounding Taiwan and emphasized the need for normalization. In this regard, some mainland Chinese media have interpreted that the training of the aircraft carrier formation includes “full training for the liberation of Taiwan.”
On April 5th, the spokesperson of the Chinese navy, Gao Xiucheng, stated that the navy organized the Liaoning aircraft carrier formation to conduct training in the waters around Taiwan, aiming to test the effectiveness of the troop training and help improve the ability to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests, and emphasized the training will be “normalized” in future.
On April 7, according to China’s “Shenzhen Satellite TV”, Wang Hongguang, a retired lieutenant general of the Chinese army who was regarded as a “hawk”, believed that the “periphery” of Taiwan as described by the navy spokesperson could be small or large: small to within the range of firepower of naval guns against land-based targets in Taiwan such as airports, ports, and shore defense fortifications, and large to the distance that four armies of land, sea, and air firepower can cover Taiwan. As aircraft carrier firepower, it is normal for the Liaoning fleet to be three to five hundred kilometers west of Taiwan.
Wang Hongguang also pointed out that the People’s Liberation Army conducts regular training and exercises around Taiwan, which can be large or small, ranging from single-ship, single-aircraft and single-subject, to multi-ship and multi-aircraft combined training, multi-arms contract exercises, and multiple services and multi-subjects. There was even a joint exercise for the whole process of a campaign to liberate Taiwan.
The “hawk” general described, “In the future, the People’s Liberation Army will be like a giant python, wrapped around its prey, Taiwan, which can be tightened slowly or swallowed in one bite.”
While the Liaoning carrier formation appeared in the eastern waters of Taiwan, the Chinese Air Force also dispatched 10 sorties of military aircraft to conduct combat readiness cruises in the southwest airspace of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, including 1 KJ-500 AWACS, 4 sorties of J-16 fighters, and 4 sorties of J-10 fighters and 1 Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft. Among them, the Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft flew to the southeast airspace of Taiwan.
According to “Shenzhen Satellite TV”, from a tactical point of view, the aircraft carrier formation and land-based aircraft can cooperate with each other to complete anti-submarine, anti-ship, and reconnaissance training. In particular, the fixed-wing early warning aircraft KJ-500 and the fixed-wing anti-submarine aircraft Y-8 can transmit data to the aircraft carrier command center in real-time to expand the combat capability of the aircraft carrier.
The report argues that the arrival of the Y-8 in Taiwan’s southeastern airspace actually builds an “information highway” between the Liaoning fleet in the waters east of Taiwan and the land-based PLA military aircraft in Taiwan’s southwestern airspace, completing an information link that completes the information “encirclement” of Taiwan from the east, south and west.
According to Shao Yongling, a professor at a Chinese military academy, the Liaoning formation’s training means that Taiwan’s eastern waters, which used to be considered a “safe zone” and a “retreat” by Taiwanese officials, are beginning to be “unprotected”. “The pressure that Taiwan’s military needs to face is not only from the frontal Taiwan Strait.