The United States has positioned troops on a tiny island chain less than four miles from the Chinese coast, Taiwan has admitted.
In an apparent escalation of the American military presence in Taiwan, a Taiwanese defence minister told reporters the country was running an “exchange” with the US to “figure out how to improve” its military.
Although the US has announced it was training Taiwanese forces on the country’s main island, Formosa, the Pentagon has never acknowledged the presence of American troops on the Kinmen Islands, which lie 3.7 miles from the Chinese coastal city of Xiamen.
In response to reports that US special forces were operating on the islands, Chiu Kuo-cheng, the Taiwanese minister, admitted on Tuesday that his country’s military was learning from American forces there.
“This exchange is for mutual observation, to identify the problems we have, figure out how to improve and to recognise their strengths so we can learn from them,” he said.
He added: “We can learn from each other to see what strengths we have. This is a fixed thing.”
The Kinmen Islands sit on the far side of the Taiwan Strait, the 110-mile body of water that separates Taiwan and China. They are around 100 miles from Taiwan, but easily visible from the Chinese mainland.
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