After three days of military drills aimed at Taiwan, China has finally called it quits.

On Monday, China said its drills had ended successfully. Taiwan’s defence ministry said it detected 12 Chinese warships and 91 aircraft around the island on Monday…

A senior US official told Reuters that the administration was closely watching China’s actions in the Taiwan Strait and said Beijing’s military exercises undermined peace and stability in the region.

China has been sending military planes toward Taiwan for years. The difference this week was the involvement of China’s aircraft carrier sending jets in from the east.

A map of flight paths released by Taiwan’s defence ministry showed four J-15 fighter jets to the island’s east – suggesting that the Chinese military is for the first time simulating strikes from the east, rather than the west where China’s mainland lies.

Analysts said it was likely the jets had come from China’s Shandong aircraft carrier – one of two such carriers it possesses – which is currently deployed in the western Pacific ocean, about 320km (200 miles) from Taiwan.

The Chinese military confirmed on Monday in a statement that the Shandong had “participated” in Monday’s exercises. It said fighter planes loaded with live ammunition had “carried out multiple waves of simulated strikes on important targets”.

The Chinese Aircraft Carrier Type-002 “Shandong” reportedly spotted yesterday by Cantonese Fishermen to the East of Taiwan. pic.twitter.com/CEu6X8uGCB

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) April 8, 2023

All of this was in response to Taiwan’s president meeting with House Speaker McCarthy in California last week. China had vowed some sort of retaliation if the meeting took place but observers noted the response to the meeting was less significant to the reaction to former Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. NBC reports China is trying to gauge how to respond to the US without looking belligerent to other countries around the world.

Experts say the exercises were smaller in scale and severity than Beijing’s actions last August, when it encircled Taiwan with unprecedented live-fire military drills in response to a visit by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

China’s show of strength this time was tempered by the negative global reaction to those military exercises, said J. Michael Cole, a senior adviser on countering foreign authoritarian influence at the International Republican Institute.

Beijing is also wary of undercutting the image it is trying to cultivate as a moderate alternative to American global dominance, as well as a potential mediator in Ukraine.

“You cannot propose a peace plan in Europe while at the same time you are launching large-scale military exercises against a neighbor,” said Cole, who is based in Taipei.

Meanwhile, the US Navy continues to ignore China’s other warnings about who controls what in the South China Sea. Monday a US destroyer sailed around an island in the Spratly Island chain that China has militarized and claimed as its own.

On Monday, a statement from the US Navy’s 7th Fleet said the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius passed within 12 nautical miles – the internationally recognized limit of a nation’s territorial waters – of Mischief Reef in the Spratly islands, known as the Nansha Islands in China.

Mischief Reef, which lies in the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone, is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. But Beijing has asserted its claims to the island by building it up and placing military infrastructure on it…

“Features like Mischief Reef that are submerged at high tide in their naturally formed state are not entitled to a territorial sea. The land reclamation efforts, installations, and structures built on Mischief Reef do not change this characterization under international law,” the US 7th Fleet statement said.

China’s real problem is that it has multiple conflicting goals which do not add up to a coherent picture. On the one hand it wants to claim ownership of Taiwan and the entire South China Sea, by force if necessary. On the other hand it wants to play peacemaker in the Middle East and maybe even in Ukraine. It’s hard to see how they can square this circle. Either you’re seizing territory by force, just as Russia is trying to do now by targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, or you’re standing up for peace and respect for human rights. I think it’s pretty clear which side of the coin Xi Jinping is really on. He’s shown his true colors in Xinjiang and in Hong Kong.

Here’s a CBS News report on the military operation around Taiwan.