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China has kicked off its largest military exercises around Taiwan in more than a year, calling the drills “punishment” for what it claimed was a “provocation” from Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te, who took office on Monday.
The People’s Liberation Army said the exercises, scheduled to take place in waters and airspace surrounding Taiwan over the next two days, were also a “serious warning against outside interference and provocations”.
The move marks Beijing’s first military reaction to the inauguration of Lai, whom the Chinese Communist party has denounced as a “dangerous separatist”.
The PLA’s Eastern Theater Command said the army, navy, air force and rocket force would practise “seizing control of the battlefield”, striking key targets and sailing and flying close to Taiwan’s main island.
It said the forces would conduct combat readiness patrols and operate inside and outside the “first island chain”, which runs from Japan to the Philippines off the Chinese coast — language widely understood to be a reference to simulations of operations to keep US forces from coming to Taiwan’s support from the western Pacific.
“This is the first of many measures that Beijing is likely to take in order to punish and warn both Taiwan and the US,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific programme at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “This will be followed by other military, economic and diplomatic measures.”
Lai pledged in his inaugural address on Monday to preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and called on Beijing to work with him for peace and common prosperity instead of engaging in military intimidation — a statement his aides called a gesture of goodwill.
But he also said the country needed to step up efforts to preserve its sovereignty and defend itself against Chinese encroachment and threats, emphasising more clearly and forcefully the status of the Republic of China — Taiwan’s official name — as a country separate from the People’s Republic of China.
China’s state broadcaster on Thursday said the drills were a response to Lai’s speech.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to take it by force if Taipei refuses to submit to its control indefinitely. Over the past few years, Beijing has stepped up a military intimidation campaign featuring regular air and naval manoeuvres that have gradually moved closer to Taiwan. It has also conducted occasional large-scale drills in response to political moves by Taipei that it disapproves of.
In August 2022, the PLA conducted unprecedented exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan. The army shot missiles over the island that landed in the exclusive economic zone of Japan after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited Taipei.
In April last year, Beijing reacted to a meeting between then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen in California with another round of war-games.
The two-day duration announced on Thursday makes the new drills shorter than the previous two. Unlike those in 2023, they do not include live-fire shooting.
The PLA published a map showing five exercise areas ringing Taiwan. According to geographic information system (GIS) software calculations done by the Financial Times, the areas would reach into Taiwan’s contiguous zone and bring the PLA closer than before, especially to the island’s east coast.
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, states may claim a contiguous zone up to 24 nautical miles from their coastline, giving them jurisdiction of that ocean area.
But Taiwanese officials said the actual manoeuvres were not happening that close. “The Chinese ships are all outside the 24-nautical-mile zone,” said a senior national security official.
“These are non-war coercion manoeuvres,” said Su Tzu-yun, an analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a defence ministry-backed think-tank in Taipei. “If they entered our 12-nautical-mile zone, the sovereign waters, that would trigger a strong response also from the US, but what they are doing now is trying to undermine our jurisdiction in a way that doesn’t allow us to do much.”
China’s coastguard announced what it called law enforcement patrols around several Taiwan-held islands just off the Chinese coast. Chinese law enforcement vessels will sail as close as three nautical miles from those islands, according to a map published by China’s Fujian province coastguard.
“The question is: Will there be actions taken that we haven’t seen in previous exercises?” Glaser said, adding that Beijing could conduct inspections of commercial ships around Taiwan.
Taiwan’s defence ministry called the drills an “irrational provocation that has undermined regional peace and stability”. It said Taiwan “seeks no conflicts, but we will not shy away from one.”
Additional reporting by Andy Lin in Hong Kong
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
