US condemns China missile launches near Taiwan, urges de-escalation

The United States on Thursday condemned China's launch of 11 ballistic missiles around Taiwan during major military drills as an overreaction to Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, urging Beijing to decrease tensions.

The US House speaker was the highest-profile US official to visit Taiwan in years, defying a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory.

In retaliation, China launched a series of exercises in multiple zones around Taiwan, straddling some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and at some points just 20 kilometres from the island's shore.

"China has chosen to overreact and use the speaker's visit as a pretext to increase provocative military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait," White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

"The temperature's pretty high," but tensions "can come down very easily by just having the Chinese stop these very aggressive military drills," he added.

Taiwan said the Chinese military fired 11 Dongfeng-class ballistic missiles "in several batches" and condemned the exercises as "irrational actions that undermine regional peace"..

But Japan, a key US ally, said that of the nine missiles it had detected, four were "believed to have flown over Taiwan's main island".

Taipei's defence ministry said it had detected 22 Chinese fighter jets briefly crossing the Taiwan Strait's "median line" during Thursday's exercises.