Taiwan’s Defense Ministry called the drills a provocation and said its forces were prepared to respond.
The PLA’s Eastern Theater Command spokesperson Navy Senior Captain Li Xi said the navy, army air force, missile corps were all mobilized for the drills. “This is a major warning to those who back Taiwan independence and a signifier of our determination to safeguard our national sovereignty," Li said in a statement on the service’s public media channel.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony before being unified with China at the end of World War II. It split away in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to the island as Mao Zedong's Communists swept to power on the mainland.
Lai took office in May, continuing the eight-year rule of the Democratic Progressive Party that rejects China’s demand that it recognize Taiwan is a part of China. China routinely states that Taiwan independence is a “dead end” and that annexation by Beijing is a historical inevitability.