The Investigator | No.02/2026
Much has been made about the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) motivations in launching large-scale People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises around Taiwan at the close of 2025, in particular its desire to express displeasure with the Trump administration’s record-breaking US$11 billion (£8.2 billion) arms sale to Taiwan and the remarks of Sanae Takaichi, Prime Minister of Japan, regarding her country’s involvement in a cross-strait conflict. No doubt these recent developments shaped the nature of ‘JUSTICE MISSION 2025’; the name given to the military exercises held between 29th-30th December. However, the PLA should not be understood as merely performative nor reactive.
The PLA’s activities in December 2024 demonstrated its ability to deploy large numbers of vessels around Taiwan without fanfare or loudly exploiting a perceived ‘provocation’ to justify its actions. During these unnamed drills, an extraordinarily large number of Chinese naval vessels (around 90) created two maritime ‘walls’. The first blocked the waters east of Taiwan and the second stretched along the First Island Chain, while PLA aircraft simulated attacking foreign naval ships.
Also important to recall is that, according to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has instructed his military to be capable of taking Taiwan by 2027. In this vein, as the United States (US) Department of War recently noted, the PLA has been ‘refin[ing] multiple military options’, and throughout 2024 ‘tested essential components of these options’ through exercises.
Thus, it seems plausible that the PLA was looking for another opportunity to refine the Chinese war machine. 2-3 big exercises around Taiwan per year had been becoming standard practice, yet, until late December, only one such exercise had taken place in 2025 – April’s ‘STRAIT THUNDER’.
Weeks before Washington even announced its bumper arms sale, Tsai Ming-yen, Taiwan’s top intelligence chief, warned that it was ‘not unlikely’ that the PRC’s military could combine routine combat-readiness activities and hold large-scale military exercises before the end of the year. It appears that this is what happened. It also seems likely that Beijing believed American arms sales would give it a plausible pretext to escalate its activities.
While the PLA conducted threatening and destabilising manoeuvres around Taiwan, Beijing and its mouthpieces promoted the line that Washington and Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) were to blame for rising tensions. ‘More arms sales, more danger’, Chinese state media told the world in an English-language video, linking every large-scale PLA exercise around Taiwan since 2022 to that year’s arms sale – a convenient starting point given that in 2019, the only year when the value of US arm sales (totalling US$10 billion [£7.4 billion]) came close to the recent deal, no PLA military drills were forthcoming.
With the justification for JUSTICE MISSION 2025 established, military manoeuvring could begin. Like the December 2024 drills, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and China Coast Guard (CCG) were deployed in tandem, blurring the lines between military and ‘law-enforcement’ activities. This time, however, there was a surge in PLA aircraft entering Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone, and live fire also returned, with missiles landing in waters to the north and south of Taiwan.
The announced exercise zones around Taiwan were geographically the largest ever, encircling the island and covering critical supply routes. Five of them covered not only parts of Taiwan’s contiguous zone, but also its territorial waters (extending 24 and 12 nautical miles [nm] from the country’s coastal baseline respectively).
Prior to launching JUSTICE MISSION 2025, the PLA plainly stated that its forces would simulate ‘blockading key ports’. The drills alone affected 857 international flights and 84 domestic flights, according to Taiwan’s Civil Aviation Administration. Meanwhile, it has been argued that other assets deployed – those with anti-submarine and anti-surface vessel capabilities – simulated counter-intervention operations to support such a blockade. Indeed, the PLA promised that it would practise ‘all-dimensional deterrence outside the island chain’ – making explicit what it only signalled the previous December with its naval ‘walls’.
While the message to foreign forces was clearer, Beijing’s willingness to antagonise Washington and Tokyo appeared limited. Live firing was confined to one day, not spread across four as it was following the trip by Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, to Taipei in August 2022. Additionally, no exercise zone encroached into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), nor – unlike the post-Pelosi exercises – were any missiles fired into it. In fact, there was a large gap in PLA exercise zones between Taiwan and Japan’s southwestern Yaeyama Islands.
It is perhaps telling that it was not Washington which Lin Jian, spokesperson for the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, directed his ire at when first asked about the link between American arm sales and JUSTICE MISSION 2025, but rather Taiwan’s ‘DPP authorities’ and ‘their massive...arms purchase’. ‘Anyone who tries to arm Taiwan to contain China’, gathered journalists were then informed, ‘will only embolden the separatists’.
If Beijing was sending anyone a message late last year (‘their own’ citizenry aside) it was the Taiwanese people. Bolstering its actions with fiery words and some sensational images, the CCP aimed to convince people in Taiwan of the futility of resisting unification.
While opposition legislatures blocked a special defence budget proposed by Lai Ching-te, President of Taiwan, PRC propagandists wanted to emphasise that more weapons would not make Taiwan safer. As one academic quoted by Chinese state media phrased it: ‘seeking “independence” through force is a dead end’.
Beijing also sought to bring into question the utility of the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), launchers capable of delivering long-range precision strikes at coastal targets in southern China. The passing of the special budget would fund the additional acquisition of HIMARS, giving Taiwan a total of 111 units. The PLA released footage of a system operator reporting to his commanders: ‘target information of (a) HIMARS rocket launcher has been received’. Meanwhile, Chinese state media promoted the claim that the system would be like a ‘porcupine in [a] glass box’, given the detrimental impact the islands’ terrain would have on the system’s mobility. This is if additional HIMARS even arrive; during JUSTICE MISSION 2025, the CCG released its ‘Throat-choking’ poster, which depicts a Taiwanese Evergreen cargo vessel carrying the rocket launchers being intercepted and boarded (a harbinger for things to come? If so, it would be an extraordinary escalation).
This was not the only propaganda poster deployed to convey the PRC’s ability to keep outsiders out. ‘Any external interference that touches the shield will perish!’ read another poster from the PLA, featuring two Great Wall-embellished shields, while another graphic showed the Chinese military cutting off Taiwan’s international supply lines, asking: ‘How can you plot for “independence”?’
Promoting Taiwan’s armed forces as powerless to stop the PLA is another way Beijing seeks to sap Taiwanese morale. In this vein, the Chinese military shared footage, which it claimed to have captured with a drone during the exercises, of Taipei 101 followed by the line: ‘so close, so beautiful, ready to visit Taipei anytime’.
This was not an isolated incident. According to the Taiwanese military’s Political Warfare Bureau, at least 46 pieces of disinformation were circulated to aid efforts in undermining confidence in Taiwan’s government and armed forces, as well as trust in the US. One piece claimed that CCG vessels had quarantined key Taiwanese ports, while another alleged that the PLA had advanced within nine kilometres of the main island’s southern shores. ‘Troll armies’, according to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB), amplified such narratives, with some 19,000 ‘controversial messages’ pushed out on social media by 799 accounts over the course of five days.
Yet, scare stories aside, the PLA and the CCG continued to edge closer to Taiwan. Of the 27 rockets fired during JUSTICE MISSION 2025, ten landed in Taiwan’s contiguous zone, making it the closest-ever Chinese live-fire exercise. On 29th December, 11 PLAN ships and eight CCG vessels entered Taiwan’s contiguous zone, with the same numbers repeated the following day. Although Taiwanese authorities claimed that the entry of the latter eight CCG vessels was only brief, being promptly warned away, it still marked an escalation given that only one CCG vessel reportedly crossed this line during STRAIT THUNDER.
This ongoing ‘salami slicing’ not only allows Beijing to assert its expansionist territorial claims, but also heightens the risk for escalation. Taipei has long asserted that any aircraft or vessel crossing into its airspace (which overlaps with its 12nm territorial waters) would be viewed as a ‘first strike’. In the case of the PLAN encroachment into Taiwan’s contiguous zone on 30th December, Chiu Chun-jung, the Taiwanese Navy Chief of Staff, did not deny that fire control radar was locked onto a Chinese Type 052D destroyer.
Despite this growing risk, there are likely to be further large-scale military exercises around Taiwan in 2026. The PLA have been told to train, and, with Lai set to remain in office, psychological pressure on the Taiwanese public will be sustained. From across the Strait, people in Taiwan will continue to be warned of the futility of acquiring ever more advanced American weapons. Meanwhile, the PLAN and CCG look set to edge closer to the main island, normalising behaviour once considered escalatory.
Next time the skies around Taiwan are shut down, observers should not confuse the justifications offered in Beijing’s propaganda with the underlying drivers of these actions. If Chinese policymakers can find – or manufacture – a suitable pretext this year, they will likely use it to legitimise their attempts to rehearse, probe and advance their position. However, such a large-scale exercise may have to wait until after the anticipated state visit of Donald Trump, President of the US, to the PRC in April…
Gray Sergeant is the Research Fellow in the Indo-Pacific at the Council on Geostrategy.
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