Taiwan’s defense ministry said on Friday that several groups of Chinese warplanes and warships were operating in the Taiwan Strait area as of 11 a.m., including on Taiwan’s side of the middle line, an unofficial part of the strait that the US had designed decades ago. the risk of collision. Robert Chao, founder of chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp, announced that he is donating NT$3 billion ($100 million) to Taiwan’s defense. “With the Chinese Communist Party acting so despotically towards Taiwan, perhaps they think that all Taiwanese fear death and crave money?” he said at a fiery press conference. “But I hope. . . We are standing up and fighting to defend freedom, democracy and human rights.” Chao previously told Taiwanese media that his two sons would return to the country if China invaded. His latest comments were the strongest from a high-profile Taiwanese hardware magnate since military exercises began this week. Last week, Mark Liu, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s top chip maker, told CNN that “no one can control TSMC by force.” China’s unprecedented live-fire war games, which have sparked the biggest cross-strait crisis since the 1990s, began this week to punish Taiwan for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the country . China’s foreign ministry announced Friday afternoon that it would impose sanctions against Pelosi and members of her family. “The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has insisted on going to Taiwan, ignoring China’s serious concerns and strong opposition. This . . . severely violates the ‘one China’ principle,” the ministry said, without elaborating on the scope of the sanctions. On the final stop of her five-nation tour, Pelosi met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who condemned China’s missile launches and called for an immediate end to military exercises. Pelosi told a news conference that while the visit to Taiwan was not intended to change the status quo, it came in the context of China’s repeated efforts to isolate Taiwan from the rest of the world. Pelosi and Kishida spoke hours after China first fired ballistic missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Chinese official media, meanwhile, tried to rally support for the drills after an international backlash. An article in military mouthpiece PLA Daily said the drills were aimed at “deterrence” after Taiwan and the US conspired to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, echoing Beijing’s insistence that Washington was ultimately responsible for the provocation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the National Defense University in Beijing, claimed that a US aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, was forced to retreat several hundred kilometers after the People’s Liberation Army set up a firing range in eastern Taiwan. Pelosi’s trip to Asia has also highlighted the diplomatic dilemma for regional leaders at loggerheads between the world’s two largest economies. On Thursday, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declined to meet with Pelosi during her visit to Seoul, as his administration faces growing Chinese pressure over its trade and defense ties with the US. The apparent embarrassment was cheered by Chinese media and netizens. “Pelosi does not appear to be popular in Seoul,” wrote China’s state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times. Additional reporting by Maiqi Ding in Beijing and Tom Mitchell in Singapore Video: Will China and the US go to war over Taiwan?