President of Taiwan called on Wednesday for a coalition of democracies to maintain peace in the region helping protect freedom of her nation.


Taiwan President Hon. Tsai Ing-wen called on for an alliance of democracies to defend against "aggressive actions" and protect freedom, alluding to Communist China's advancement in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait as major threats to regional stability.

Beijing, which claims democratic Taiwan as its own, has ramped up its military activities around the island, as well as in the disputed East and South China Seas.

Speaking in Taipei at a forum attended by top Taiwanese security officials and senior Western diplomats, Hon. Tsai said Taiwan stood at the forefront of defending democracy from "authoritarian aggression".

"The rapid militarisation of the South China Sea, increasing and frequent grey-zone tactics in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, coercive diplomacy used against countries and corporations are all destabilising the Indo-Pacific region," Hon. Tsai said, without directly naming China.

"It is time for like-minded countries, and democratic friends in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, to discuss a framework to generate sustained and concerted efforts to maintain a strategic order that deters unilateral aggressive actions."

Hon. Tsai called for actions that would prevent a war but conveyed resolve to protect democracies encouraging cooperation, transparency and problem-solving through dialogue.

On Wednesday, Taiwanese media revealed that while the Taiwanese military was engaging in a live-fire exercise involving its arsenal of long-range missiles early in the morning, several People's Liberation Army Airforce fighter jets penetrated Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone, prompting the Air Force to issue 24 warnings to drive the Chinese warplanes away.

It was one of the several incidents of the harassment of Taiwan by Beijing regime with the military means in recent weeks.



Beijing's race for world's biggest nuclear warhead stockpile

The winds of war are gathering over the region while Beijing is rushing to amass the most modern and most lethal weapons it can find, the authors of the Pentagon-published annual survey of the Chinese military concluded.

China is on track to double the size of its nuclear warhead stockpile while expanding foreign military bases capable of attacking the United States — worrying signs that Beijing is seeking global superpower status, the Pentagon warned.

“Over the next decade, China will expand and diversify its nuclear forces, likely at least doubling its nuclear warhead stockpile,” the report stated.

Chinese nuclear forces currently include large numbers of silo-based and road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with an array of high-tech weapons such as multiple-warhead missiles and ultra- high-speed hypersonic glide vehicles. Other new systems include theater-range precision strike nuclear weapons designed to counter American ballistic missile defences, advanced intelligence systems and precision-strike weapons.

Mr Rick Fisher, senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said the report presents an alarming picture of growing Chinese military power and the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to democracy and freedom.

For decades, China analysts in Washington have been downplaying or denying the possibility that China could become a global challenge to the United States, which this year’s China Military Report now acknowledges is building in plain sight, he said.

The latest annual report provides a sharp contrast with previous Pentagon surveys, which argued that China’s military buildup was defensive and limited to developing forces capable of retaking Taiwan.