Two weeks ago, after a report from the Jamestown Foundation revealed that China had been operating oil rigs within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone, the Taiwanese government condemned the actions while issuing a statement saying that they had been monitoring the situation. Their response begged the question: For how long?
“I think the likelihood [that] Taiwan doesn’t know about this is very low,” said Kitsch Liao (廖彥棻), associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “It’s very low. It’s extremely low.”
Liao is not alone. Not a single analyst that Domino Theory has spoken to could believe that Taiwan’s government didn’t know about the rigs. “I would be mortified if the Taiwanese didn’t know for five years that these oil rigs are sitting out there,” said Michael Hunzeker, director of the Taiwan Security Monitor at George Mason University.
When Domino Theory asked a spokesperson from Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s (賴清德) office why they had waited until now to protest China’s actions, she reiterated that they were monitoring the situation, but declined to elaborate.
The episode has revived long-standing debates over how much information Taiwan should share about Chinese aggression. Share too little, and Taiwan misses an opportunity to build international consensus around China as the aggressor. Share too much, and Taiwan risks revealing to China how it collects intelligence.
The dilemma has deepened as China ramps up its gray-zone operations, constantly finding new ways to harass Taiwan that fall short of outright aggression.
“The level of PLA activity around Taiwan we’ve seen since May of last year when President Lai was inaugurated is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” said Ben Lewis, an independent defense analyst who runs the open-source intelligence website PLATracker.
The oil rigs are just one prong of a rapidly escalating gray-zone strategy. In recent months, acts of sabotage targeting Taiwan’s submarine internet cables have repeatedly been linked to Chinese-crewed vessels. China’s coast guard has continued to patrol islands and reefs in the South China Sea that countries including the Philippines claim as their own. Closest to home, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force last month flew an average of 10 sorties per day into Taiwan’s self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ.
By some measures, Taiwan’s response has grown more robust. This June, a district court in Tainan sentenced a Chinese ship captain to three years in prison for damaging a submarine cable off the southwestern coast of Taiwan. He was the first person to be charged for such an act. On Friday, Reuters reported that Taiwan’s coast guard had begun 24-hour patrols to protect the cable.
But at the same time, Taiwan’s government has increasingly shied away from releasing detailed information on China’s activities. Last week, Domino Theory reported that, in March 2024, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had removed a page from its website that had documented Beijing’s efforts to block Taiwanese recognition at international events. The foreign ministry said in a statement last month that it had removed the page “to prevent China from using systematic information to conduct intelligence gathering.” (In November 2024, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s U.S. Mission began publishing a China Influence Tracker newsletter, which it publicizes on its X account. The reports are far more detailed than the foreign ministry’s ever were.)
The oil rigs are just the latest example. Chung Chieh (揭仲), a research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that Taiwan likely knew about the rigs, but didn’t publicize their existence prior to the Jamestown report because it doesn’t have the resources to put up a fight. “Our sea and air forces, as well as patrol capabilities around [Pratas], are stretched thin, leaving us in a relatively passive position.”
Chieh said that cases like the oil rigs, which occur in areas of overlapping exclusive economic zone claims, are usually handled through mutual coordination. “If coordination fails,” he said, “the stronger party often has the upper hand.”
But Julian Ku (古舉倫), faculty director of international programs at Hofstra University School of Law, said that such an approach risks giving the impression of complacency.
“How much does Taiwan’s government really care about these encroachments if it didn’t bother publicly criticizing them for five years?” Ku wrote in an email, referring to the Chinese rigs, which Jamestown reported had been operating in the area since 2020.
Similar fault lines animate the debate around information released by the Ministry of National Defense. In January 2024, the ministry changed the format of its daily public reports on Chinese ships and aircraft operating around Taiwan. It had reported the exact model of every aircraft that crossed the median line separating Taiwan and China in the Taiwan Strait, as well as its flight path through the ADIZ. The ministry now shows a map with highlighted flight zones and an aggregate list of aircraft types, split into categories such as “UAV” (unmanned aerial vehicle) and “fighter.”
At the time, the shift disappointed Ben Lewis of PLATracker, who felt that detailed reports from the defense ministry could have helped Taiwan highlight the surge in sorties around President Lai’s inauguration last year. Now, he thinks it might be a lost cause.
“We can’t make PLA operations on all sides of Taiwan on a weekly, sometimes, nearly daily basis, taboo, because they’ve already normalized it,” he said.
According to Lewis, when he raises the issue with Taiwanese officials, they offer the same explanation that Domino Theory got from the foreign ministry: protecting operational security. “I don’t practically put a lot of stock in [this argument], but I can understand that it’s a very effective argument to make as a military organization.”
But publicizing ADIZ incursions can have unintended consequences. Once the government begins publishing a certain amount of information, the public will expect them to keep publishing it. When the government highlights an action by the Chinese military, said Michael Hunzeker of George Mason University, the public will also expect them to do something about it.
Hunzeker even suggested that the defense ministry’s ADIZ reports might contribute, in a perverse way, to China’s gray-zone strategy. “I do wonder if, on some level,” he said, “the spike in the ADIZ intrusions and the so-called median line over flights wasn’t, in part, a function of the fact that now this stuff was being made public and so now you can demonstrate, look, there’s nothing you can do about us doing this to you.”
Kitsch Liao of the Atlantic Council agrees in part with Hunzeker, but thinks the problem isn’t so much the way in which the defense ministry responds to Chinese activities, but the consistency with which it does so. “Unfortunately, Western philosophy, through the evolution of the Cold War, subscribed to deterrence through certainty,” he said. “We’re assured in the certainty that we’re gonna destroy each other. That’s why nobody’s gonna move.”
Liao thinks the Chinese are more likely to respond to the opposite. “You don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “You don’t know how serious I am. That’s why I won’t interfere.”
It is worth considering, though, whether a policy based on any level of secrecy can work in an age where open source intelligence is plentiful, and social media turns every citizen into a potential journalist.
The Philippines, which also has overlapping claims in the South China Sea, has sought to take advantage of today’s information environment, freely posting videos documenting Chinese activities online. Last month, a Chinese Navy vessel collided with a Chinese Coast Guard ship while chasing a Philippine patrol boat near the disputed Scarborough Shoal. Crew members from the Philippine boat caught the moment on film. The clip went viral.
“If you’re not posting, you’re not sharing information, I think that might be a bigger risk,” said Jaime Ocon, who was previously a broadcast journalist in Taipei and is now a master’s student in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. “What if a fisherman sees a Chinese coast guard, takes a picture and sends it to the media?”
To Ocon, there is another reason for the government to be as transparent as possible with what it knows. Taiwan is an open society, and that is what open societies do.
“I guess that’s one of the risks of being a young democracy,” he said.
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