General Yang Zhibin, head of the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command, and Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, met on September 4 on the sidelines of a defense conference in Canada. This was the first direct contact between these two commands, with the Eastern Theater responsible for any operation against Taiwan, located approximately 100 miles across the strait at its narrowest point. Prior to this meeting, high-level military dialogues between the US and China involved the Southern Theater, focused on the South China Sea. Admiral Paparo has publicly described recent PLA activities around Taiwan as « rehearsals » for forced unification, having observed 152 Chinese vessels at sea in a single day in 2024.
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