Chinese military drills took place around Taiwan earlier this week, with Chinese authorities announcing seven reserved areas of airspace on December 9, to last until December 11. What followed was what some have termed the largest deployment of Chinese naval vessels around Taiwan since 1996.
The drills are generally understood to be a reaction to Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s first overseas trip, during which he visited the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu. As part of this trip, Lai made two stopovers in the United States. Lai first stopped in Hawai‘i on his outbound trip, during which he visited the Bishop Museum and spoke of ties between Indigenous Taiwanese and Austronesian peoples. While in Hawai‘i, Lai also spoke by video call with former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
During his return trip, Lai stopped in Guam, where he continued to hold video calls with U.S. leaders. Lai spoke with Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senator Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Guam is notably the closest U.S. territory to Taiwan, as a result of which there have been warnings that China might stage a preemptive missile attack on Guam in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.
The announcement of China’s military drills took place soon after Lai returned to Taiwan on the evening of December 6.
Still, the United States’ de facto representative body in Taiwan, the American Institute in Taiwan, stated that it does not view the drills as a response to the Lai transit. Instead, the AIT said that the drills were part of China’s broader regional assertiveness in past years, which is not only directed at Taiwan.
Ahead of Lai’s trip, Taiwanese government officials also warned that they saw China as likely to conduct military drills in response, and called on China to exercise restraint.
While this evidently did not happen, China did not actually announce a new set of drills. China conducted two series of drills earlier this year in May and October, as a response to Lai’s presidential inauguration and Taiwan’s National Day, respectively. These were dubbed “Joint Sword 2024A” and “Joint Sword 2024B.” But China’s drills this week were not given a formal name.
This has led to speculation that China may be aiming to keep the criteria by which it decides to launch drills ambiguous and to project the perception that it can conduct military exercises directed at Taiwan anytime it wants, as a means of keeping Taiwan on guard. At the same time, China has signaled its intent to hold a series of drills through the naming pattern of the “Joint Sword” exercises, likely seeking to routinize the military exercises it holds directed at Taiwan.
During China’s unnamed drills, Reuters reported on December 9, citing unnamed sources in Taiwan’s defense establishment, that 90 Chinese vessels had been detected, two-thirds of which were navy vessels and the rest of which were coast guard ships.
Defense Ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang stated that the number of ships deployed by China exceeded not only the two Joint Sword exercises, but also the drills that took place after Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022, as the first U.S. speaker of the house to visit Taiwan in a quarter century. Taiwanese defense officials also stated that the drills took place through the First Island Chain, rather than just around Taiwan, and involved practicing denying other regional actors access to Taiwan, rehearsing for a possible blockade.
At the same time, international responses to the drills were relatively muted. In part, this could be because the drills took place in the same timeframe as other major international political events, such as President Yoon Suk-yeol abruptly declaring martial law in South Korea, or the sudden collapse of the decades-long regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The United States has not had a high-profile response to China’s latest military activity around Taiwan, though it is unclear if this was an attempt to downplay the scale of the drills or simply because so much was happening elsewhere in the world.
China’s drills also did not dominate the domestic news cycle in Taiwan. In general, the Taiwanese public has not had a strong reaction to Chinese military exercises directed at Taiwan, even when these actions dominate international headlines, as during the Pelosi visit to Taiwan. The public may have become inured to Chinese threats after decades of missiles pointed at Taiwan – a stark contrast to past decades, when Chinese military threats led to waves of migration out of Taiwan. This raises the question of whether the public may be sufficiently vigilant toward Chinese military threats due to their long having become routinized.
Although a full-scale invasion would be detectable by satellite, with troops massing on the coasts of China, Taiwanese defense officials have voiced the possibility that large-scale Chinese drills could turn out to be pretext for actual military activity such as a blockade.
After the end of the announced period for the drills on December 11, Chinese coast guard vessels were still detected in waters near Taiwan. By December 13, however, they had left the immediate area. Having vessels stay near Taiwan after the end of the drills may have been a form of gray-zone activity, or meant to keep Taiwan on edge about whether drills were genuinely over or not.
Whether or not the drills were, in fact, the largest Chinese naval deployment since 1996 has in become a political issue in Taiwan. Pan-Blue outlets of note such as the United Daily News accused the Lai administration of having provided no proof that the drills are, in fact, of such magnitude in an op-ed by the newspaper’s editorial board.
This would be in line with the increasingly skeptical attitude that the pan-Blue camp has taken toward defense, as observed in efforts in the legislature by the Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party to block the budget, cut funding for Taiwan’s domestic submarine program, and limit the scope of civil defense legislation.
Perhaps defense authorities in Taiwan have not been successful at communicating a sense of threat to the broader public, but at a time in which Taiwan’s defense is increasingly contested between political parties, the pan-Blue camp may also seek to cast doubt on the veracity of threats from China.
