Washington has long been Taipei’s most important ally and biggest arms supplier – angering Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory.

The M1A2 tanks – the first batch of 108 ordered in 2019 – arrived in Taiwan late Sunday and were transferred to an army training base in Hsinchu, south of the capital Taipei, the defence ministry said.

The M1A2s are the first new tanks to be delivered to Taiwan in 30 years, the semi-official Central News Agency said. Taiwan’s current tank force consists of around 1,000 Taiwan-made CM 11 Brave Tiger and US-made M60A3 tanks, technology that is increasingly obsolete. Abrams tanks, which are among the heaviest in the world, are a mainstay of the US military.

Taiwan faces the constant threat of an invasion by China, which has refused to rule out using force to bring the self-ruled island under its control.

China’s foreign ministry on Monday urged the United States to “stop arming Taiwan… and supporting Taiwan independence forces”. “The Taiwan authorities’ attempt to seek independence through force and foreign help is doomed to fail,” ministry spokesman Lin Jian said. “China will firmly defend its national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.”

While it has a home-grown defence industry and has been upgrading its equipment, Taiwan relies heavily on US arms sales to bolster its security capabilities. Taiwan requested the state-of-the-art M1A2 tanks in 2019, allocating the equivalent of more than $1.2 billion for them. The rest of the order is expected to be delivered in 2025 and 2026, an army official told AFP. While US arms supplies to Taiwan are enshrined into law, a massive backlog caused by Covid-19 supply chain disruptions and US weapons shipments to Ukraine and Israel have slowed deliveries to Taiwan. The backlog now exceeds $21 billion, according to Washington think tank Cato Institute.

Taiwanese authorities said last week that China had held its biggest maritime drills in years, with around 90 ships deployed from near the southern islands of Japan to the South China Sea. […] Beijing did not confirm the drills and its defence ministry did not say whether the manoeuvres had taken place when asked at a press conference on Friday.