The Chinese military officer who oversaw the naval portion of Beijing’s military drills around Taiwan earlier this month is a former China coast guard leader who was recently appointed to his new role, Nikkei Asia reported, citing military sources.
The former coast guard chief, Wang Zhongcai, took over as the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) head of Eastern Theater Command at some point before late July, according to Chinese media outlets cited by Nikkei.
Wang’s work in his previous role hints at the aggressive approach with which he has commanded his forces. He ordered the China coast guard’s forays into waters surrounding islands administered by Japan, which calls them the Senkakus, but also claimed under the name Diaoyu by China.
Before heading the Chinese coast guard, Wang served in a senior post with a naval fleet that covered an area encompassing the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, according to a 2019 analysis published by the Diplomat. His appointment to that post, wrote Ying Yu Lin, an assistant professor at National Chung Cheng University, “also indicates that China will maintain a more active presence in the East China Sea and Taiwan Strait in the future.”
In addition to lobbing missiles into the waters surrounding Taiwan following House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan this month, China also sent aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and ships across the Taiwan Strait median line.
Beyond those military drills, the appointment of Wang also comes at a particularly delicate time, considering Beijing’s increased effort to claim the Taiwan Strait as its own waters. In recent months, China has conveyed to U.S. officials that it considers the strait as its internal waters, since it claims Taiwan as part of its territory, per a Bloomberg report. The Biden administration reportedly views that assertion as a drastic change in Chinese policy and has rejected it.
The PLAN also appointed Mei Wen, a former political commissar on the Liaoning — China’s first aircraft carrier — as its Eastern Theater Command’s political commissar. The Nikkei report says that Mei’s post is equivalent to that of a commander’s. Yasuyuki Sugiura of Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies told Nikkei: “They may be looking at operating an aircraft carrier around Taiwan.”