Taipei — Taiwan’s Defence Ministry has issued its most direct warning in years that China is moving from pressure to preparation, from drills that shape perceptions to rehearsals that could be flipped into real combat with little notice. A pattern of early alerts from Taipei about invasion risks has persisted since 2023, as documented in The Eastern Herald’s reporting. In a biennial report released on Thursday, officials described an adversary that pairs massed military activity around the island with a broad spectrum of influence and cyber operations designed to erode public trust, confuse decision makers, and delay the mobilization of a defense that depends on speed.
The document’s argument is blunt in its framing, then granular in its detail. China’s military, political and maritime tools are described as converging toward a single strategic aim, to make a fait accompli more likely if Beijing ever decides to attempt it, and to condition Taiwan’s society to doubt its own capacity to resist. Earlier episodes of choreographed pressure, including broadcast missile simulations targeting Taiwan, foreshadowed tactics now seen at sea and in the air. The study catalogs not only the familiar signals of pressure, daily flights and sailings that ignore the median line in the strait, but also coastal law enforcement moves, civilian shipping practices, targeted social media campaigns, and advances in artificial intelligence that can generate convincing forgeries at scale.
From exercise to execution
Recent war games increasingly resemble rehearsals that can be flipped into real operations. This mirrors a wider pattern of bloc politics and narrative shaping explored in TEH’s analysis of a shifting information landscape. Analysts in Taipei say Beijing has used at least seven major rounds of war games around the island since 2022, each one designed to test command loops, logistics and the messaging that accompanies military motion. What once looked like set pieces has become a rotating calendar. The ministry’s caution is that this calendar can be rewritten at any moment. A drill announced for deterrence can become an operation of enforcement. A blockade rehearsal can harden into a cordon. A “joint combat readiness patrol” can be rescripted as the opening of a strike plan.
That risk is amplified by the way China mixes actors in its scenarios, a phenomenon that TEH has tracked across the western Pacific, including Chinese joint activity in the Pacific airspace. Civilians and uniformed forces now move in patterns that are difficult to parse in real time. The report notes that roll-on, roll-off merchant ships receive military training and are fitted with equipment that shortens loading times for vehicles and bridging gear. Coast guard cutters sail patrol boxes that mirror navy lanes. Maritime militia units, built around fishing fleets and small commercial craft, shadow and surround. In any crisis, identifying which hulls are carrying troops or supplies, and which are bait, becomes a high-stakes sorting problem measured in minutes.
Hybrid pressure in the grey zone
The hybrid pressure toolkit has grown to include coast guard moves around disputed waters, a dynamic TEH examined in its South China Sea primer on a potential flashpoint for wider conflict. Officials define this as the continuum between peace and open conflict, where coercion replaces dialogue and ambiguity blunts international response. The tactics include repeated air and sea incursions that normalize risk, coast guard boardings or inspections near outlying islands, the testing of responses to balloons and unidentified craft, and an uptick in harassment around undersea cables that link Taiwan to the world’s financial and data networks.
Digital tools are central. The report describes a “professional cyber army” that seeds falsehoods through ordinary accounts and more convincing sock puppets, then boosts the narratives through state media and aligned outlets. For background on how information shocks travel through markets and public services, see TEH’s guide to what news is and how it is verified. The goal is less to persuade than to exhaust. If enough contradictory claims circulate about a budget vote, an arms contract, or the integrity of a civil defense drill, the public square becomes noisy and brittle. Deepfake audio and video can surface within hours of a speech or security incident, forcing authorities to fact check in real time while adversaries press their advantage elsewhere.
How a blockade would look
TEH has previously charted how staged escalations at sea can become coercive routines, including visual propaganda that normalizes strike scenarios over Taiwan such as animated missile sequences. While invasion scenarios still dominate public imagination, the ministry devotes significant attention to a blockade, a tool that sits below an outright landing but above the routine harassment that has become common. A blockade can be tailored. It can target specific ports. It can be announced as a limited inspection regime in the name of safety. It can be switched on and off around political moments to shape behavior. The report traces how joint drills have practiced interdiction lanes, airborne closures, and missile no-go arcs that would force international carriers to reroute. It reminds readers that the most effective blockades are gradual. They make trade costlier week by week. They turn insurance into a veto.
The economic stakes echo TEH’s coverage of chip geopolitics after sanctions shocks, including analysis of the post-Micron ban chip fight. For Taiwan, a blockade scenario raises questions of stockpiles, repair capacity, and the decentralization of essential services. Energy reserves, hospital generators, water pumping stations, and data center redundancy all appear in the text as factors that shift the calculus for both sides. The value at risk cannot be overstated. Taiwan is a semiconductor hub whose fabrication plants are woven into supply chains for everything from smartphones to cars to fighter aircraft. A weeks-long slowdown would ripple through inventories well beyond Asia. A months-long interruption would reset pricing power in sectors that have not seen scarcity for a generation.
Inventory stress and shipping detours have formed a global story in recent months. TEH has chronicled tech supply strains, including an overview of how chip demand shapes logistics. Those economic mechanics run through insurance tables and shipping contracts. Underwriters price risk in increments that feel abstract until a crisis turns them into hard stops. If premiums surge on routes that touch Taiwanese ports or the waters around them, carriers will calculate detours in days and fuel loads, then pass the costs along the chain. That chain ends in wholesale warehouses and retail shelves in the United States and Europe, where just-in-time inventories were already thinned by the shocks of recent years. A protracted squeeze would also change bargaining power inside industries that rely on chips for product launches on fixed calendars, from smartphones in the holiday quarter to automotive lines that plan years ahead.
The response in Taipei
Taiwan’s modernization push emphasizes hardening and agility. TEH has tracked similar air defense debates across other theaters, from Europe’s drone-threatened skies to Asia’s choke points, including a field report on multinational exercises and airspace alerts. The report sits alongside a modernization push that has increased annual drills, expanded civil defense training, and prioritized asymmetric weapons that complicate the plans of a larger adversary. Coastal defense missiles, smart sea mines, fast attack craft, mobile air defenses, and dispersed command posts are billed as the spine of a “porcupine” posture. Procurement is matched with process, from faster reserve call-ups to streamlined logistics for fuel and spare parts. The ministry writes candidly about weak spots, including the need to accelerate anti-drone capabilities before small unmanned systems proliferate further around outlying islands like Kinmen and Matsu.
Budget credibility will determine whether these plans have bite. TEH’s economics desk has examined emergency energy logistics, including diesel logistics that buffer hospitals and grids. Taiwan’s leaders have set a target to lift defense outlays to about five percent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade, a figure that, if sustained, would put the island in a class of its own among U.S. security partners in the region. Officials argue that the headline number is less important than consistent execution. They point to multiyear procurement lines for munitions, and to an expanding domestic industrial base for drones, air defense components, and maintenance of legacy systems that cannot be swapped out quickly. Training hours and retention are treated as capital investments in the text, not line items that can be shaved in a tight year.
Politics and signaling
Political signaling around National Day will be read across the region. For a primer on layered defenses and what integrated networks look like in practice, see TEH’s reporting on air defense coordination during heightened alerts. The timing of the report is deliberate. It arrives on the eve of National Day, when the president traditionally lays out priorities for the year ahead. This year, advisers preview a larger emphasis on integrated air defense and social resilience, from shelters to emergency communications. The political context is delicate. Beijing labels President Lai Ching-te a separatist and uses the charge to justify military theatrics whenever Taipei speaks of sovereignty. The defence ministry’s language avoids provocation, focusing instead on deterrence by denial and the need to keep the strait predictable enough for trade.
Communication is the hinge between preparation and panic. TEH’s newsroom guide to information hygiene explains why cadence and clarity matter in crises, see our explainer on news verification. Every sentence in that balancing act lands on the same dilemma. Strategic clarity can invite reaction. Ambiguity can invite miscalculation. Taiwan’s leaders are trying to walk between those poles by making their preparations visible without turning the island into a garrison in the public mind. The report devotes space to mental health services for reservists, to community drills that double as civic gatherings, and to communication protocols that push accurate information to phones during a fast-moving incident. Confidence is treated as a national asset. Panic is treated as a risk vector on its own.
Lessons from recent drills
Sequenced exercises across the East China Sea and Bashi Channel have created a pressure rhythm that neighbors must read accurately. For regional context on how air and naval movements can be stitched together for effect, TEH reviewed a joint strategic patrol over the Pacific. Long-range launches in the East China Sea, carrier movements through choke points, and coast guard patrols near outlying islands are stitched together into a narrative that looks like practice for escalation control. Each piece is deniable in isolation. Together they form a coherent pressure system. The use of civilian ferries and cargo ships in these evolutions is presented as especially noteworthy. If war planners can reliably count on civilian lift, they can shape an operation’s tempo without telegraphing that a surge is coming.
The informational side of drills has its own hazards. TEH’s coverage of European airspace jitters during drone incidents, including airport slowdowns and reroutes, offers lessons on public messaging under stress. When China announces a code name for drills or releases curated footage of rocket artillery, it forces Taiwan to communicate at two levels at once, to partners abroad who want to know how close the exercises came to the island’s airspace, and to citizens who want to know whether to postpone travel or queue for fuel. The report argues for disciplined public briefings that avoid minimization but refuse alarmism. The premise is that uncertainty is the adversary’s force multiplier. A steady flow of facts blunts it.
Regional stakes
The story is regional as much as it is local. Japan and the Philippines face their own tests, especially around the South China Sea. Shipping companies have spent two years relearning the alphabet of risk across the world’s sea lanes. Beijing’s planners understand that a more anxious neighborhood can produce the opposite of what they want, deeper coordination among democracies that prefer to hedge. The defense text hints at that dynamic through references to multinational exercises, information-sharing with partners, and the possibility of new inspection routines for cargo bound to and from Taiwanese ports if tensions spike.
Washington remains the strategic constant. TEH has written about how partners plan for the first hours of a crisis, including debates over deterrence by denial and survivability windows. For Taipei, the relationship is insurance and dependence in equal measure. For Beijing, it is the obstacle that justifies preparation. The report does not pretend that the United States can be written out of any scenario. It does insist that Taiwan must be able to absorb the first blows and remain governable while help is debated and mobilized. That is the core of deterrence by denial in the Taiwanese telling, to make the first seventy-two hours survivable without outside intervention, and the first weeks manageable with it.
Industry mobilization and supply lines
Industrial drills now sit alongside military ones. TEH’s business desk has covered typhoon disruptions that preview logistics stress tests, including regional flight surges during storms. On the corporate side, Taiwan’s technology giants, their suppliers, and foreign customers have spent the past two years rehearsing continuity. Companies have mapped alternate ports and airfields for emergency lift. They have diversified some chip packaging and testing across Southeast Asia without losing the production advantages of northern Taiwan. These steps cannot erase geography. They can reduce the risk that a single port closure or a temporary air defense exclusion zone turns into a global shortage. The government’s planning documents emphasize public and private drills that treat factory restart as a national priority after a shock, side by side with restoring power and water.
Energy and data resilience are practical, not abstract. TEH has written extensively on backup power and critical nodes during wartime and disaster response, including hospital generator logistics. Diesel reserves and the logistics to move them are treated as a bridge between outages and grid stability. Hospitals and data centers are prioritized not because they are symbols, but because they are nodes that stabilize everything else. A country that can keep surgeries on schedule, keep records accessible, and keep traffic signals and pumps running is a country that can buy time. That time is the most valuable commodity in a crisis that unfolds across weeks and months rather than hours.
What to watch next
Signals to track will include larger flight packages crossing the median line and expanded coast guard formations near Penghu or Kinmen. TEH has also flagged how seasonal weather and political calendars can intersect with security moves, as in our coverage of storm-driven transport reroutes. Online, a surge of anonymous accounts around a budget vote or a court case can be as meaningful as the sudden appearance of balloons in the strait. The report also cautions readers to monitor the tempo of drills around anniversaries and political speeches. If an exercise advertised as routine suddenly adopts exclusion zones that mirror live-fire events earlier in the year, take it seriously.
Execution will be measured at home in training hours and spare parts, not just in headlines. TEH’s conflict coverage has repeatedly shown how the unglamorous investments decide outcomes, from low altitude air defense seams to hardened communications. Domestically, budget execution and training tempo will be the markers of seriousness. The modernization line items that matter most in this framework are not glamorous. They include spare parts for older aircraft still needed as gap fillers, the rapid deployment of short-range air defenses to plug low altitude seams exploited by drones, and a hardened communications backbone that can route around damage to cell towers and fiber lines. The ministry’s text even drills down to staffing and procurement processes, noting that delays in delivery schedules can be mitigated if Taiwan builds more of the systems it needs to sustain in a long crisis.
A contest of time and will
Time and confidence are the scarce resources. TEH’s essays on resilience argue that routine and recovery speed matter as much as new kit, a theme that runs through our reader’s guide to crisis information. The report ends with a contest measured in months and years rather than days. Beijing’s strategy, as Taipei describes it, is to bend time, to lengthen the sense of inevitability until the world adjusts to a new normal. Taiwan’s counter is to shorten recovery cycles after shocks, to treat every disruption as rehearsal for the next, and to keep politics restrained enough to make resilience boring. That is how the island hopes to sustain a credible deterrent without living in a state of emergency.
The next near-term benchmark is National Day, when leaders sketch the year’s priorities. TEH will monitor how rhetoric translates into procurement and training targets, and how neighbors calibrate responses around the South China Sea and broader western Pacific. For now, the public benchmark is the National Day speech that will follow this report. Taiwan’s leaders are expected to sketch in more of the technology and training that would knit air defenses into a tighter net, to explain how civil defense will scale beyond the capital, and to signal to partners abroad that the island is paying for more of its own security. Beijing will decide how to respond. The strait has rarely been more crowded. The argument from Taipei is that clarity, patience and preparation can keep it open.
