TAIPEI - Taiwan’s annual military drills will, for the first time, involve defending the island’s main international airport and also training to keep the sea lanes open in the event of a Chinese blockade, officials said on Tuesday.

China regards democratically governed Taiwan as a renegade province to be reunified, by force if necessary.

China practised precision strikes and blockades in drills around the island in April after Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen met US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said the “Han Kuang” exercises in late July would see the military defending Taoyuan International Airport, the island’s most important air link with the rest of the world, from an airborne assault of paratroopers and helicopters.

Meanwhile, fighter jets would land and take off at Taitung’s civilian Fengnin airport on the east coast, to simulate it acting as a back-up if runways are destroyed at air bases during a war.

“The Taoyuan airport (part) is aimed at the enemy threat and designed with its main focus as anti-airborne exercises,” Mr Lin Wen-huang, who heads Taiwan’s defence ministry’s combat and planning department, told a news conference.

“Fengnin is a back-up airport and will be engaged in related take-offs, landings and replenishment to maintain air combat power.”

Meanwhile, at sea, the armed forces will practise “saturation attacks” on enemy ships, including amphibious assault ships and “anti-blockade escorts”, he said.

Taiwan’s traditional military thinking during a conflict has been to use its mountainous east coast, especially the two major air bases there, as a place to regroup and preserve its forces, as it does not directly face China unlike Taiwan’s west coast.

But China has increasingly been flexing its muscles off Taiwan’s east coast, sailing warships and flying warplanes there and showing its ability to operate much further away from China’s own coastline. REUTERS