If you look at Taiwan's size, about 300km North-South, you'd see that those red blocks are mostly all just out of the 22km territorial waters limit. So really there isn't all that much Taiwan can complain about, legally. Might makes right, except that it's already legally in a gray zone.
Re. any sovereign state's military will feel obligated to fight against such sheer threat - Taiwan needs the US to intervene if it gets attacked and would not risk giving it an excuse not to by being itself trigger happy.
However, a small part of the exercises will be within 10 miles.
Beijing announced plans for six zones encircling Taiwan where it said it would carry out live-fire military drills from Thursday to Sunday, according to a statement released by Xinhua, China’s state news agency. Ships and aircraft were warned against trespassing those areas — some of which overlap with the island’s territorial waters — for “safety reasons,” the statement said. One of the areas of the planned drills appeared to be less than 12 miles from Kaohsiung, a southern port city, according to a map released by Xinhua.
What China is saying is "we're firing live ammo in these areas, stay out". This area of actual intrusion is quite, quite, small. That does not mean China will move planes or ships into it - they may just fire shells or missiles to make a point. Or even not do no so, after saying they reserve the right to do it.
They may still intrude and get chased out: big incident, little actual "damage". On Taiwan's end, they are very happy to be getting the visit, so there is also an incentive not to heighten tensions overmuch, to avoid dissuading future US visits.
Compared to what some sabre-rattlers are calling on China to do, and given the level of provocation claimed by China, this isn't all that horrible an outcome. But it would still be easy for something to go wrong and Pelosi's visit is needlessly pushy on a China that the West needs to keep from supporting Russia overmuch during the current Ukraine crisis.
"China threatens to shoot Nancy Pelosi’s plane down if she visits Taiwan," says a July 31 post on Instagram. It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
The statement did not originate with China’s government. It was tweeted by Hu Xijin, former chief editor of and now a commentator for the Global Times, a Chinese nationalist newspaper. He later deleted the tweet after Twitter blocked his account.
Sure, the US would probably not fire missiles into a country's territorial waters just to make a point. But then again the US has a long list of other "departures" from international law (as I expect multiple comments to pipe up about) when it suits them, so acting over-sanctimonious here is more theater than them being objectively better in this regard.
i.e. this will probably all blow over but the UN chief makes a good point that we are taking big risks. In this case, for unclear reasons besides Pelosi's posturing.
p.s. I am not being supportive of China or its intent to reunify Taiwan by force if necessary here. Merely stating that risking armed incidents, especially at this point in time, for fuzzy notions of "national integrity" would be the height of foolishness. Here's another example of unproductive jingoism. Plenty of time to show some backbone towards China when something critical happens. Wanna help Taiwan? Sell them better weapons.
