Taiwan remained on high alert on Wednesday after China staged massive military drills around the island the previous day, keeping its emergency maritime response centre running as it monitored Chinese naval manoeuvres, the Taiwan coast guard said.
The exercises, named “Justice Mission 2025”, saw China fire dozens of rockets towards Taiwan and deploy a large number of warships and aircraft near the island, in a show of force that drew concern from western allies.
Taipei condemned the drills as a threat to regional security and a blatant provocation.
Chinese ships were now moving away from Taiwan, but Beijing had yet to formally declare the end of the exercises, according to Kuan Bi-ling, head of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council.
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“The maritime situation has calmed down, with ships and vessels gradually departing. As China has not announced the conclusion of the military exercises, the emergency response centre remains operational,” she said in a post on Facebook late on Tuesday.
A Taiwan coast guard official said all 11 Chinese coast guard ships had left waters near the country and were continuing to move away. A Taiwan security official said emergency response centres for the military and coast guard stayed active.
There are currently more than 90 Chinese naval and coast guard vessels in the region, with many of them being deployed in the South China Sea, near Taiwan and the East China Sea in a large maritime show of force, two security officials in the region told Reuters.
The officials, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the size of China’s maritime deployment has steadily increased since early this week.
Asked about the drills on Monday, the US president, Donald Trump, said he had a great relationship with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, “and he hasn’t told me anything about it”.
“I certainly have seen it … I don’t believe he is going to be doing it,” Mr Trump said, appearing to refer to an actual invasion. “Nothing worries me.”
Australia said it was deeply concerned about the military exercises, and had raised the issue with Chinese officials.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat) said the large-scale simulations risked destabilising the region and could result in an accident or escalation.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched the expansive surprise attack simulation on Monday. Dfat said the exercises were “deeply concerning, destabilising, and risk inflaming regional tensions”.
According to Taiwan’s defence ministry, the PLA, the armed wing of China’s ruling Communist party, had fired 27 missiles from the Chinese coastline into waters near Taiwan on Tuesday.
At least 70 Chinese war planes, 11 navy ships and 14 vessels from China’s militarised coast guard were also detected.
The Taiwan defence ministry said the missiles came closer to Taiwan’s main island than in previous live-fire drills.
Some landed in Taiwan’s 24-nautical mile contiguous zone, and at least 13 ships were also detected within those restricted waters, the ministry said.
In the 24 hours from 6am on Monday, the military detected 130 war planes, 28 ships, amphibious assault ships, and one surveillance balloon.
It is the sixth major PLA military exercise targeting Taiwan since 2022, when it launched days of live-fire drills in retaliation for the-then US speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visiting the island. In April, it held a two-day operation labelled Strait Thunder-2025A, prompting expectations for a “B” before year’s end.
Analysts said it was the first time the PLA had explicitly said it was practising deterring international involvement. Also, unusually, a number of PLA aircraft remained visible on radar platforms.
Beijing claims Taiwan is a Chinese province and is preparing to annex it militarily, with the aim of being capable of invasion by 2027, according to US intelligence from several years ago.
As the war games unfolded, the ambassadors to China from countries that make up the Quad grouping, formed to conduct security dialogue, convened in Beijing on Tuesday.
United States ambassador David Perdue posted on X a photo of himself with the Australian, Japanese and Indian ambassadors at the US embassy. He called the Quad a “force for good” working to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific, but gave no details about the meeting.
The US embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
The drills, China’s most extensive war games by coverage area to date, forced Taiwan to cancel dozens of domestic flights and dispatch jets and warships to monitor. Soldiers were seen running rapid-response drills including putting up barricades at various locations.
China regarded the exercises as a “necessary and just measure” to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, its Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhang Han told reporters on Wednesday at weekly briefing. They were “a stern warning against Taiwan independence separatist forces and external interference”, she added.
China’s state news agency Xinhua published an article summarising “three key takeaways” from the drills, which began 11 days after the United States announced a record $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan. – Reuters/Guardian
