Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense announced today that in the last 24 hours, 21 fighter jets of the Chinese Air Force violated the island’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ).

The ministry clarified that it was 17 J-10 fighters (i.e. comparable in terms of capabilities to the American F-16) and 4 J-16 fighters (i.e. a Chinese modified version of the Soviet Sukhoi Su-27 design ), which breached the southwestern sector of the ADIZ, releasing a map of their route.

Taiwan’s ADIZ is considerably wider than the island’s airspace itself. It includes part of Chinese airspace, as well as mainland China.

Taipei complains that Beijing has sharply increased the number of violations in the southwestern part of the zone in the past two years.

The island of 23 million people lives under the constant threat of invasion by the Chinese military. Since the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949), Beijing has characterized Taiwan as a breakaway Chinese province, destined to one day be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.