US and Canadian navy ships passed through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said on Monday.
“One United States and one Canadian naval vessel sailed through the Taiwan Strait from south to north yesterday,” the ministry wrote on X.
Taiwan’s armed forces maintained full control over the relevant maritime area and airspace during the ships’ passage, and the situation was under control, the ministry added.
The situation around Taiwan has become significantly more tense since Nancy Pelosi, then-Speaker of US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing it as US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Formal relations between China’s central government and its island province were severed in 1949 after Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the two sides have been in contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing-based Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation.
