October 24, 2024 • 12:05 pm ET
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Dispatch from Taiwan: China’s military drills look more frightening outside of Taiwan than from inside
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TAIPEI—Earlier this month, China’s military undertook yet another simulated blockade of Taiwan, employing not only Chinese navy vessels, but also the unprecedented involvement of Chinese coast guard ships. International commentary on China’s Joint Sword 2024B drill portrayed the event as foreboding and indicative of China’s rising threat to Taiwan’s freedom. But the Taiwanese view from the ground, which I witnessed, was quite subdued.
Rather than viewing the drill as an indicator of growing Chinese strength and resolve to militarily seize Taiwan, it was reported domestically with the frankness of a mild weather event. This contrast in reactions between international analysts on the one hand and domestic Taiwanese reporting and my conversations with locals on the other reveals an important narrative gap that risks overinflating Chinese capability and will. This, in turn, risks deterring international support for Taiwan should China one day launch a cross-strait attack. To prevent this, international Taiwan watchers must integrate the assessments of those with the greatest stake in their meaning—the Taiwanese people themselves.
Another round of ‘Joint Sword’ saber rattling
My interest in Taiwan, like that of so many other security practitioners and scholars, has been both professional and personal. This latest trip was intended to be personal, a vacation hiking across Taiwan. I planned to traverse from Taipei to Kaohsiung, then east through Pingtung, and end with a foray into the Central Mountain Range that rises across the island like a spine. I took this journey during the holiday weekend of Taiwan’s National Day, October 10, locally referred to as Double Ten Day. This annual holiday commemorates events that led to the establishment of the Republic of China, and presidential remarks are customary.
The focus of the trip transformed because it coincided with National Day. Just before my flight to Taiwan, on October 5, President Lai Ching-te delivered remarks contrasting the age of the communist People’s Republic of China, now seventy-five years old, and the founding of the nationalist Republic of China, now 113 years old. He did so to highlight the fact that, “it is absolutely impossible for the People’s Republic of China to become the motherland of the people of the Republic of China.” The implication to listeners is that Taiwan’s existence predates that of communist China and was never ruled by it.
And on National Day itself, Lai reinforced traditional talking points of his Democratic Progressive Party, noting that Taiwan is not subordinate to China and that Taiwan would “also uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”
It was clear that China would react to this rhetoric with some sort of military demonstration or threat. Taiwanese political actions and speeches that reinforce Taiwan’s sovereignty routinely yield Chinese aggression, as such events undermine the principal lie of the Chinese Communist Party that Taiwan is but a province of the People’s Republic of China. The only mystery was what, exactly, China would choose to do. However, the US Department of State did not raise its travel advisory regarding Taiwan ahead of the holiday, and I boarded my flight as planned.
China showed its hand over Taiwan’s holiday weekend by launching Joint Sword 2024B. For most of Sunday, Taiwan time, the People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade around Taiwan, deploying forces to the west, east, and north of Taiwan. Notably, Joint Sword 2024B included the most Chinese military aircraft ever used in this way in a single day.
Contrasting perspectives
On the ground in Taiwan, I consumed the international reporting that exploded online. It focused on the new additions of mass, airpower, and coast guard ships, as well as the starkness of the threat posed by China. China watchers on X and other social media platforms emphasized the size of this drill, the increasingly joint nature of China’s exercises, and the speed at which the event occurred. Readers could be forgiven for surmising that China could, indeed, enact an effective blockade at the drop of a hat, and that there is little the international community could do about it, even if it mustered the will to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf.
But from the eye of the storm, things were remarkably calm. Within Taiwan, the reporting and analysis was brief and frank, as though the exercise was a weather report, a confirmation that one need not cancel their planned outdoor picnic. Indeed, the Taiwanese television news I watched dedicated far more air time to local politics, such as Keelung Mayor Hsieh Kuo-liang defeating a recall vote, and international news, such as a Blue Angels parachutist crashing into spectators in San Francisco, than it did to Joint Sword 2024B. Life, and the holiday weekend, continued unabated.
Discussions with local Taiwanese, while anecdotal, were revealing. From the observatory of Taipei 101, the skyscraper that dominates the city’s skyline, one Taiwanese I spoke with gestured to the rugged, mountainous terrain surrounding the city and said, “Do you think China wants to fight through all that?” Surveying the amphibiously uninviting beaches around Kaohsiung, another local said, “That’s just not enough room to put all the soldiers China would need to beat us.” While throwing dice in a game of Shi Ba La in rural Pingtung, another local looked at one of the Joint Sword 2024B exercise maps on X and shrugged dismissively: “Seems like they showed us more about them than we showed them about us.” And at a noodle shop at the foothills of the Central Mountain Range, a defender’s paradise, questions about an invasion’s feasibility were met with dismissive laughter.
Integrate Taiwanese analysis to blunt China’s Joint Sword
None of this is to suggest that Joint Sword 2024B’s significance should be dismissed, and there could be purposeful differences between the Taiwanese government’s perceptions of this event and that of the Taiwanese public. Indeed, it reveals a new escalation in China’s pressure campaign against Taiwan, with the highest number of aircraft ever used in a simulated blockade of Taiwan and joint integration of forces across China’s military services. Analysts are right to study it.
But my experience also indicates that the significance of such drills can be inflated. Notably, it can lead international observers to unsoundly conclude that China can conduct such drills immediately and at will, blockading Taiwan interminably, and strangle Taiwan into submission quickly at a time of its choosing. Such conclusions are wrong, and play into China’s narrative warfare.
The drill’s correlation with Lai’s remarks could give the impression that China can enact such an operation at the drop of a hat. But any experienced military planner has repeatedly lived through a more frustrating truth: operations of such scale and complexity take months of detailed planning and coordination. Given Lai’s affiliation with the Democratic Progressive Party, which is vocal about Taiwan’s sovereignty in contrast to the more China-conciliatory Kuomintang party, this exercise was almost certainly going to occur after Lai’s Double Ten Day remarks regardless of what the president did or didn’t say.
Additionally, international commentary focused on the fact that Joint Sword 2024B included the largest number of Chinese military aircraft ever detected in such a drill. This was accompanied by misinformation regarding impacts on shipping to Taiwan. Yet overall, this exercise was actually smaller in scale than previous drills and resulted in no real disruptions to Taiwanese trade. This and the brevity of the exercises—lasting a mere thirteen hours—raises additional questions on the efficacy of a blockade, in terms of Chinese capability and Beijing’s will to enforce it, especially if the international community aimed to call China’s bluff and push shipping through despite claims of a blockade’s enactment.
It is important that Taiwan watchers understand the operational limitations of such Chinese drills. If policymakers are led to believe, incorrectly, that China can snatch control of Taiwan at will and that defending Taiwan is infeasible, then China will have achieved a cognitive fait accompli that deters international intervention.
By no means should analysts be dismissive of the real and pressing danger that China presents to Taiwan. The threat is grave and real. The mild manner in which Taiwanese reporting reacted to Joint Sword 2024B could be a troubling indicator of complacency.
But at the same time, analysts should be mindful that dramatic reactions to such drills risk inflating China’s capability and will to blockade or seize Taiwan militarily. This could lead to one of two undesirable outcomes.
Policymakers could wrongly conclude that they must stop devoting resources to other strategic interests, such as Ukraine, to properly resource the ability to deter and fight China. This would result in strategic losses in the short term that would ultimately make China more difficult to defeat in the long term.
Alternatively, policymakers may wrongly conclude that defeating China is a goal so unachievable that they are only reinforcing failure by investing in Taiwan’s defense, so they should abandon the goal entirely.
Perhaps the simplest place to start in this effort is to pay closer attention to Taiwanese reporting on Chinese military activity. Taiwan’s very existence is at grave risk should China attack it. As such, Taiwanese views are a critical barometer that should be studied in response to shows of Chinese military aggression. While the threat of a Chinese attack on Taiwan is real, inflating the capability of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan risks succumbing to Chinese narrative warfare and creating unsound policy outcomes.
Lieutenant Colonel Brian Kerg is a nonresident fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Kerg is an active-duty US Marine Corps operational planner and most recently served as the G-5 director of plans, III Marine Expeditionary Force.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions or opinions of the US Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US government.
The Tiger Project, an Atlantic Council effort, develops new insights and actionable recommendations for the United States, as well as its allies and partners, to deter and counter aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Explore our collection of work, including expert commentary, multimedia content, and in-depth analysis, on strategic defense and deterrence issues in the region.
Further reading
Image: Ceremony of Taiwan National Day (Double Ten) celebration at the Presidential Palace in Taipei on October 10, 2024.