China has an allied vessel in its sights in a new propaganda video of the People's Liberation Army Navy shadowing U.S. and allied warships passing through the Taiwan Strait.
"The strait, a narrow strip of water, nurtures deep roots of blood ties," the narrator of the Chinese video says, as footage shows Chinese military planes and warships keeping tabs on foreign vessels. "Demons may rage, but they cannot sever the umbilical bond continuously connected to the motherland," he adds.
Like the U.S. Navy, the Chinese military regularly deploys air and naval assets to monitor foreign vessels near its shores, although China rarely discloses videos or photographs of these routine encounters.
The U.S. maintains its movements through the strait support freedom of navigation in international waters, in line with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Taiwan also considers the strait international waters beyond its 12-nautical mile (13.8 mile) territorial waters.
However, Beijing disputes that the busy waterway is open to global shipping and claims jurisdiction over waters that extend at least to its exclusive economic zone, which in its view would encompass self-ruled Taiwan, a territory it considers part of China.
According to a chart compiled by Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies think tank, the U.S. is known to have conducted six Taiwan Strait transits this year as of Tuesday, two fewer than by this point in 2022 and 2023.
The undated videos show Chinese forces shadowing several foreign ships, including the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Chung-Hoon, which transited the Taiwan Strait in January and June 2023.
Another ship appears to be the Dutch Navy frigate HNLMS Tromp, which sailed through the waterway on May 31.
The video reflects the standard Chinese Communist Party stance that unification with Taiwan is inevitable and necessary for what President Xi Jinping has called "the national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."
China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a written request for comment.
China has in recent years increased its military deployments and war games in waters surrounding Taiwan to pressure the democracy, which since 2016 has been led by a president from the Beijing-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party.
These activities also include near-daily aircraft sorties across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, the de facto boundary between the uneasy neighbors.
The most recent sortie occurred on Tuesday by a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon anti-submarine patrol plane from the U.S.'s forward-deployed Seventh Fleet.
In a statement, the fleet said the flight was in line with international law and U.S. efforts to support "the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations." "The United States military flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows," the statement added.
U.S. allies like Canada, France, and the U.K. have also increased their transits in the strait to assert freedom of navigation.
Last week German warships passed through the contested Taiwan Strait on Friday, for the first time since 2002, defying China's warnings against the two vessels.
"International waters are international waters. It is the shortest and, given the weather conditions, also the safest route. So we are going through," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in Berlin.
Xi has never renounced the use of force to achieve this goal. Some U.S. officials, including CIA Director Bill Burns and former Indo-Pacific Command chief Admiral John Aquilino, believe Xi is preparing Chinese forces to be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.
The Republic of China government fled to Taiwan after being defeated by Mao Zedong's communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
For decades, the Republic of China claimed to be the legitimate government of China. Though its list of official allies has dwindled to a dozen, Taiwan remains de facto independent with its own government, military, currency, and diplomatic relations.
According to a poll by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University in Taipei, over 80 percent of Taiwanese prefer either maintaining the status quo or declaring official independence, while less than 7 percent favor unification with China.
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