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On Monday, China’s People Liberation Army flew 25 aircraft, including fighter jets and bombers, through Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, marking the largest such incursion since the self-ruled democracy began making its data on them public last September. Taiwan has continued to monitor the movements of the Chinese aircraft, transmit radio warnings to them and track them with its missile defense systems. But it stopped scrambling its own fighter jets every time to intercept them, admitting in March that it doesn’t have the resources to keep up with what it called Beijing’s “war of attrition.”
The latest incursion came a day after an editorial in the Global Times, a Chinese state media outlet, called for “adequate countermeasures” to a new policy announced by the U.S. State Department on Friday. The new U.S. guidance eases decades-old restrictions on meetings between American officials and their Taiwanese counterparts in order “to encourage interactions,” as State Department spokesperson Ned Price put it.