Taiwan says Chinese aircraft flew near island in military exercise

China flew several fighter and reconnaissance aircraft near Taiwan in a training exercise, the self-ruled island's defense ministry said on Friday. Despite decades of growing trade across the Taiwan Strait, China has never renounced the use of force, if necessary, to reclaim what it considers a breakaway province to which the defeated Nationalists fled after losing a civil war in 1949. "We were in a position to monitor their movements from the beginning to the end," defense ministry spokesman Chen Chung-chi said, describing what he called a routine exercise.