China Stages Massive Live-Fire Encirclement Drill Around Taiwan as Washington and Japan Fortify

Taiwan says 89 Chinese military aircraft and 28 PLA Navy and coast guard vessels surged into the island’s air and maritime approaches.

TAIPEI — Following massive military sales from Washington to Taiwan and rapidly scaled defensive preparations from Japan, Beijing on Monday launched a sweeping show-of-force including live-fire activity around Taiwan.

The encirclement-style operation brought 89 Chinese military aircraft and 28 PLA Navy and coast guard vessels into the waters and skies around the island, one of the heaviest single-day tallies reported in more than a year.

Taiwan’s Presidential Office condemned the operation as a “unilateral provocation” that destabilizes regional peace, while stressing that Taiwan’s security agencies had “complete situational awareness” and had made preparations. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said it activated an emergency response posture and conducted immediate readiness drills.

Beijing, for its part, framed the action as a warning—an operation the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command dubbed “Justice Mission 2025,” involving the army, navy, air force, and rocket force, with designated zones for live-fire activity and sea-and-airspace restrictions.

Global coverage described the drills as rehearsing the mechanics of isolation: blockade-style pressure against key approaches and ports, integrated sea-air patrols, and “deterrence” aimed at what the PLA calls “external interference.”

In a statement circulated by former Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu, now head of the nation’s national security council, the message from Taipei was readiness to deploy force.

“As China ramps up military threats against Taiwan, our armed forces are conducting Rapid Response Exercises in response,” Wu stated Monday morning. “We remain resolute and unafraid. We’ll defend our sovereignty and democracy at all times.”

Across international coverage, analysts assessed Beijing’s actions as escalation through rehearsal, designed to demonstrate a capacity to encircle Taiwan, with live-fire elements and disruption to regional routes. Coverage also emphasized the “stern warning” language aimed at “Taiwan independence” forces and foreign actors, and Taiwan’s elevated alert posture.

The choreography of this operation matters as much as the raw numbers.

The PLA appears to be practicing the operational geometry of denying outside forces access—the kind of posture meant to complicate U.S. and allied intervention in a blockade or assault scenario. That emphasis has been widely noted in contemporaneous coverage, including reporting that the Eastern Theater Command’s messaging explicitly framed the drill as “deterrence” against “external interference.”

This helps explain why the drill lands amid a knot of accelerating pressures.

A number of analysts speculated that Washington’s major arms package and Japan’s “re-militarization”—Tokyo’s rapid defense buildup in response to Beijing’s expanding military footprint—now feed into an escalating drill cycle in which China aims to demonstrate that outside support can be deterred, delayed, or priced prohibitively high.

One clear trigger is the Trump administration’s newly announced $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan, which Beijing cast as proof of U.S. “interference.”

Another is Japan.

Regional reporting and analysis have framed the drill as a warning shot aimed not only at Taipei but at the alliance architecture around it—especially as Japanese leaders and planners speak more openly about a “Taiwan contingency” and expand defense spending and capabilities that Beijing portrays as destabilizing.

A third is the longer arc Beijing itself has helped set.

U.S. officials have repeatedly stated their assessment that Xi Jinping has directed the PLA to be capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027—a milestone that continues to shape planning assumptions across the region.

In reporting The Bureau gathered during a September 2023 visit to Taiwan, Taiwanese military experts and officials warned that Beijing’s pressure campaign had reached a new plateau: Chinese aircraft and vessels were crossing into—and remaining in—Taiwan’s territory longer, in actions they described as cognitive warfare designed to erode the public’s will to resist.

“China makes many excuses to conduct military exercises around Taiwan, and I don’t think this is only political,” said Dr. Tzu-Chieh Hung of the Institute for National Defense Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s government. “I think they are expanding the area of their military operations.”

“We think they are trying to create a new normal, when we will become numb to their actions, and make it a fait accompli,” another senior Taiwanese official told The Bureau.

Those warnings sit directly beneath Monday’s encirclement-style operation. Beyond the raw tallies—89 aircraft and 28 PLA Navy and coast guard vessels—Taiwan’s defense community sees a pattern of repeated rehearsals that stretch time, distance, and ambiguity, steadily conditioning the region to accept blockade-style actions as irreversible.

Yet the fatalism that Taiwan cannot be defended has not been the conclusion in major U.S. war-game work—and Washington’s $11-billion Taiwan arms package signals an intent to strengthen deterrence.

Back in 2023, a widely cited wargaming study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found Taiwan could repel a Chinese invasion—if Taiwan is prepared to fight immediately, and the United States and Japan move fast to deliver overwhelming air and missile firepower against the fleets that would attempt a blockade and landing.

“There is no question, two years ago most people would have said China has the ability to conquer Taiwan in a fait accompli,” Mark Cancian, one of the study’s authors, told The Bureau in 2023. “But we showed that is not true.”

“The Chinese defensive bubble at the start of the war is so strong, that Taiwan needs what it has to fight with for the first month or two,” Cancian said. “And the United States has to participate en masse and quickly. Japan must at least provide base capacity for U.S. forces, and Taiwan must defend itself.”