Tomorrow the Republic of China (Taiwan) will celebrate its National Day. Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) will give a speech. And then, on Friday, the People’s Republic of China, is expected to hold military exercises around Taiwan because of Lai’s “provocative” remarks.
What is Lai going to say? We don’t know. Unless their spies are inside the speechwriting team, China doesn’t know, either. So what’s going on?
At the beginning of this week, Taiwanese officials started warning that China was likely to hold exercises after the National Day. We don’t know exactly why they are saying this, but it seems likely that they are responding to some specific intelligence either from Taiwan itself or from the U.S. that indicates something is prepared. They have been, in this authors’ opinion, too firm on the likelihood that exercises will happen to be simply reading patterns from the past two years and making an educated guess.
That is not to say that those patterns do not exist. Since 2022, there have been three major sets of military exercises around Taiwan, each corresponding to an event that China views as provocative. The first were the exercises in August of 2022 following the visit to Taiwan of U.S. Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They took place over four days and included live firing and even missiles fired from China over Taiwan into zones off the east coast (which also covered part of Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone). China released a map before the exercises showing seven zones ominously encircling Taiwan. After the four days announced there was to a lesser extent an extension of heightened military activity.
To put them into context, nothing similar had been seen in almost 30 years since the exercise of 1996 that formed part of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. That comparison has led some authors to describe the current period as the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis.
The second set of exercises happened in April of 2023 after then President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) met with new U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in California. There were again three days of exercises involving live firing, but this time no map was released by Chinese authorities. The exercises were called “Joint Sword.” China also announced a “Special joint patrol and inspection operation,” where Chinese law enforcement vessels would inspect ships in the Taiwan Strait, but there is no evidence any ships were actually stopped.
The third set of exercises took place in May of 2024 after Lai’s inauguration. China announced two days of exercises, called Joint Sword-2024A. The significance of the “A” as a way to signal that 2024 might have more exercises was not lost on anyone. Like 2022 and unlike 2023, Chinese authorities released a map showing zones for the exercises. The map generally shared similarities with the previous one, but the zones appeared more carefully drawn to hug Taiwan’s territorial sea without actually entering it.
While neither side has drawn attention to the point, it appears that in the exercise this year, there was no live firing of weapons. This could be a way for the Chinese military to lower costs (which are certainly prodigious). Or it may be for other reasons.
There is no evidence during any of these drills that Chinese forces came close to Taiwan’s territorial sea or air space (the missiles flew through space over it). Chinese ships appear to press close to the 24-nautical mile contiguous zone that abuts the territorial sea, and this is the line where the Taiwanese navy and Coast Guard meet them. Whether they ever entered the contiguous zone is unclear.
All of this analysis and the warnings from Taiwanese officials do not of course mean that exercises will certainly take place. One of the reasons that these announcements are being made so publicly in advance is no doubt to raise the “cost” of the exercises to China, by making it harder to claim that they are in response to Taiwanese provocations. It’s possible, although it seems unlikely, that China won’t hold exercises because of these warnings, and then Taiwan will claim they were successful and China will say the whole thing was just paranoia.
It is the view of this author that the maps China releases are a key part of the psychological warfare being conducted against Taiwan and its partners, by making it feel like a blockade has been demonstrated without actually doing any such thing.
In finishing, some reassuring thoughts for readers who are not in Taipei: if there are exercises in the days following Thursday, the following will almost certainly be true. Most Taiwanese will not be affected at all and will go about their days normally. Flights will enter and leave Taiwan as normal, as will ships, despite scary-looking maps. Taiwanese armed forces men and women will be working flat-out to defend their country. These exercises are no joke for the military because they can’t afford to make the assumptions I have above.
For them, they really are open 24/7.
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