China steps up Taiwan military drills with live-fire exercises

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The Chinese military has begun 10-hour live-fire drills around Taiwan, while US president Donald Trump downplayed the danger of the recent large-scale maneuvers.

“They’ve been doing naval exercises for 20 years in that area,” Trump said. “Now people take it a little differently.”

Trump said, in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, that he had a “great relationship” with President Xi Jinping and that the Chinese leader “did not tell me anything about” the exercises.

Trump added: “Nothing worries me.”

Tuesday’s drills marked the second day of large-scale operations by military, naval, air and missile forces around Taiwan carried out by the Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army.

Chinese military officials said the exercise, dubbed “Mission Justice 2025,” will test the combat readiness of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army as well as its ability to blockade Taiwan’s ports and deter outside forces.

The exercises came just 11 days after the United States approved an $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan, the largest arms purchase of its kind between Washington and Taipei.

Zhang Xiaogang, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman, urged “relevant countries” to “abandon the illusion of using Taiwan to contain China.”

The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense said that, by 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, it had detected 130 Chinese military aircraft and 14 naval ships.

Of the 130 sorties, 90 entered the air defense identification zone in northern, central, southwestern and eastern Taiwan. An air defense zone extends beyond the boundaries of a country’s national airspace and provides an early warning system to help detect potential incursions into sovereign airspace.

Taipei transportation officials said disruptions to commercial air travel would affect more than 100,000 passengers.

Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has threatened to take control by force if Taipei resists its pressure indefinitely. In recent years, it has sharply escalated its military aggressiveness, including almost daily military activities in Taiwanese airspace and waters.

Taiwan condemned the exercises and accused the Chinese Communist Party of threatening global peace and stability. She pledged to confront Beijing’s threat by preparing “together with our democratic partners.”

Wang Wenjuan, a researcher at the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Sciences, told the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, the nationalist Global Times, that naming this week’s drills “Justice” reflected their goal of opposing “Taiwan independence,” separatism and foreign interference, and showed the full “legitimacy and legality” of these drills.

“China’s massive exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan should be condemned around the world,” said Nicholas Burns, a former US ambassador to Beijing and a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.

“Beijing once again reveals that it is the real threat to peace in the Taiwan Strait, not Washington and Tokyo,” he wrote on the social media platform X.

Any escalation in military activity around Taiwan could damage relations between the United States and China, including the fragile truce that Trump and Xi struck in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies in October.

The drills also highlighted renewed tensions between China and Japan, after Prime Minister Sanae Takaishi suggested a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a military response from Tokyo.

Cartography by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong