For nearly two weeks, Chinese fighter jets stopped buzzing Taiwan. No one seems to know why. | CNN

Taiwan’s military has grown used to the daily task of tracking Chinese warplanes flying near the island. Some days there are a handful. On others, many more. But they are a near-constant presence. So when the aircraft suddenly stopped coming for nearly two weeks, the silence was both striking and deeply puzzling. That spell was broken on Thursday with five People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft operating around the Taiwan Strait over the previous 24 hours, according to Taiwan’s military, with several flying near the median line that divides the waterway. Analysts say it was the longest pause in Chinese air activity since Taiwan began publicly releasing daily military data. “This is frankly unlike anything we’ve seen in recent history in terms of PLA activity around Taiwan,” Ben Lewis, founder of PLATracker, an open data platform that tracks Chinese military movements around Taiwan, Japan and the South China Sea, told CNN. “Since Taiwan’s defense ministry began releasing this data in 2020 the trend has been up, up, up,” Lewis said. “And now this lull, which maybe has ended today, maybe not, represents a very significant change in the pattern.” Beginning Februa