At the same time, there are also changes in the direction of the Taiwan Strait, and the PLA combat readiness police patrol has been markedly strengthened.
At present, there is less than a month left before Lai Ching-te, the new leader of the Taiwan region, takes office, but Lai Ching-te, who claims to be a "pragmatic 'Taiwan independence' worker," cannot wait to take over the Taiwan military ahead of schedule, and the most obvious example is that Lai Ching-te recently inspected the air defense and tactical fighter units of the Taiwan Air Force and demanded that "combat readiness must be maintained 24 hours a day." Lai Qingde's hurried and panicked mentality just shows that the current DPP authorities and the "Taiwan independence" forces on the island seem to be making a lot of trouble on the surface, but in fact they are very empty in their hearts and are in a state of anxiety all the time, especially in the face of the current situation in which the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is carrying out combat readiness patrols around Taiwan on a regular basis, and Lai Qingde also feels extremely insecure. The purpose of this inspection of the front-line troops is also to understand how the Taiwan military responds when the PLA fighters and missiles approach Taiwan. As a matter of fact, the DPP authorities' nervous response not only failed to bring them a sense of security, but on the contrary, they were causing trouble for themselves and falling into self-consumption, and at the same time increased the risk of a crash.
However, judging from the current situation, it is obvious that the DPP authorities have not given up on continuing to seek "independence" and provoke. Recently, the top echelons of the Taiwan military have even clamored that they are planning to set up a "coastal operations command," with a defense area of no more than 24 nautical miles, and that the goal will be combined with "peacetime and wartime conversion," and that "once PLA fighters enter the '12 nautical miles' or even '24 nautical miles' around Taiwan, they will take the initiative to strike first" and "deter the enemy" through a dense anti-ship missile fire network. It can be seen from this that the Taiwan authorities' desire to "seek independence by force" has not only not died, but has worsened it. Earlier, the DPP authorities put forward the so-called "hedgehog tactics" and "poisonous scorpion tactics" in a vain attempt to use small things to gain a big deal and carry out surprise attacks against the mainland's powerful maritime combat system. If the DPP's behavior of undermining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is allowed to be indulged, then every Taiwan citizen may become a victim of "Taiwan independence."
Against this background, in the past few days, the PLA's normalized patrols around Taiwan have noticeably increased a lot. From 6 a.m. on the 19th to 6 a.m. on the 20th, Taiwan's defense department claimed to have detected eight sorties of PLA military planes and eight warships, which continued to operate around the Taiwan Strait, and three of them flew over the so-called "center line of the strait" into Taiwan's "southwest airspace," the closest of which was about 64 nautical miles away from Taichung. Immediately after that, on the 20th, the People's Liberation Army dispatched 21 fighters of various types to carry out activities around the Taiwan Strait, of which 14 fighters crossed the "center line of the strait," and even some fighters turned east to the main island of Taiwan in the south of Penghu, which is only more than 40 nautical miles away from Keelung and Kaohsiung from north to south. On the morning of the 22nd, the PLA 052D destroyer "Lishui" (157) confronted the Taiwan Navy's "Chenggong-class" cruiser "Zhang Qian" near the waters west of the Penghu Islands.
It has been learned that the "Zhang Qian" warship of the Taiwan military has a full load displacement of 4,105 tons and is equipped with "Hsiung-2" and "Hsiung-3" anti-ship missiles and "Standard 1" anti-aircraft missiles, and is mainly responsible for anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare and the fleet's regional air defense tasks. The PLA "Lishui" ship has a full load displacement of 7,500 tons, which is much larger than the "Zhang Qian". The ship is equipped with "Hongqi-9" medium- and long-range anti-aircraft missiles, "YJ-18" anti-ship missiles, and "Changjian-10" long-range cruise missiles to attack land targets. Just as the so-called "small is seen from the big," the comparison of the tonnage of warships on both sides of the strait alone is enough to reflect the vast difference in the current military strength between the two sides of the strait, and the DPP authorities' vain attempt to "seek independence by force" is completely self-defeating and whimsical. If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the PLA will certainly strike resolutely and strike at it head-on. After all, "the PLA is ready to fight at all times, ready to fight at any time, and will thwart any interference by external forces and smash any 'Taiwan independence' separatist plot with a 'always ready' fighting posture." This is by no means an empty phrase.