China’s mainland has released detailed maps of its military drills showing Taiwan encircled by the People’s Liberation Army, the country’s armed forces. A new animation released today shows the Chinese military closing in from all sides, with Taiwan highlighted within a circular area.

Despite this, there has been little sign of concern among the island’s 23 million people, who have lived under the threat of invasion by China since the two sides split amid a bloody civil war in 1949. Business continued as usual in the bustling capital, Taipei.

Taiwan’s defense ministry said it detected 49 warplanes and 19 naval ships, as well as Chinese coast guard vessels. It said 35 of the aircraft flew into the Taiwan Strait, the de facto border between the two sides, during a 24-hour period from Thursday into today.

Naval and coast guard vessels and land-based missile units have been put on alert, especially around the Taiwan-controlled island groups of Kinmen and Matsu, which lie just off the Chinese coast and about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the Taiwan main island across the strait.

“In the face of external challenges and threats, we will continue to hold on to the values of freedom and democracy,” the territory’s new leader, William Lai Ching-te, told sailors and top security officials on Thursday while visiting a naval base in Taoyuan, just south of Taipei.

In his inaugural address on Monday, Lai called on Beijing to end its military intimidation and asserted that Taiwan is “a sovereign, independent nation” where “sovereignty rests with the people.”

China’s military said its two-day drills around Taiwan were a punishment for “separatist” forces seeking the island’s independence.

China has been sending warships and aircraft into the Taiwan Strait and other areas around the island on an almost daily basis in recent months to wear down Taiwan’s defenses and intimidate its people, who overwhelmingly support the island’s de facto independence.

“Since the Taiwan leader took office, he has been clinging to the ‘One China’ principle and wantonly promoting the ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’ theory,” said Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s Cabinet, the State Council, late Thursday.

The “One China” principle states that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China, but Beijing and Taipei have different interpretations of what that means.

Once a destination for farmers and fishermen from the Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong over the centuries, Taiwan was ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Chinese and the Japanese. After World War II, it became part of the Republic of China, under the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.

After losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists in 1949, the Nationalist government retreated to the island, which still officially calls itself the Republic of China, as opposed to the People’s Republic of China, the name of the government that now rules the mainland.

It operates as a sovereign political entity, with its own military and diplomatic relations, but it has never formally declared independence. Beijing considers the island to be a renegade province that must be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary.

“I hope that China can face up to the reality of the existence of the Republic of China [Taiwan’s official name] and, with goodwill, choose dialogue over confrontation,” Lai said in his inaugural address.

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