China Rehearses Taiwan Blockade in Largest Military Exercises to Date
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted “Justice Mission 2025” blockade drills around Taiwan from December 29–30, 2025. Beyond rehearsing military operations for a potential war over Taiwan, the exercises functioned as coercive intimidation aimed at weakening Taipei’s resolve to remain independent.
Taiwan is self-governing, with its own government, military, currency, and passport, yet in his New Year’s address Chinese leader Xi Jinping reiterated his intention to seize the island, which the Chinese Communist Party maintains is part of the People’s Republic of China.
Li Jian, a researcher at China’s Naval Research Academy, said the drills were a necessary step to safeguard peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and to advance what he described as national reunification. “This sends a clear message that seeking ‘Taiwan independence’ through external support is a dead end, while returning to the motherland is the only viable path,” Li said.
For the United States, the drills offered a rare glimpse into the PLA’s evolving strategy and capabilities. The scale of the exercises was striking, demonstrating a level of command, control, and integration across services that exceeded prior expectations. At the same time, the fact that this marked the second blockade-style exercise in 2025 suggests Beijing may be prioritizing a coercive blockade strategy rather than an immediate full-scale invasion.
The PLA described the drills as a successful test of integrated joint operations capabilities, making them the largest and most comprehensive Chinese military exercises around Taiwan to date.
The PLA deployed Army, Navy, Air Force, and Rocket Force units in coordinated operations north and south of Taiwan. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense detected 130 Chinese aircraft, 14 naval vessels, eight coast guard or other official ships, and a Chinese military balloon within 24 hours, with most aircraft crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait. Fourteen China Coast Guard vessels operated alongside PLA Navy ships, with participating assets including destroyers, frigates, H-6 bombers, fighters, missiles, and ground-based artillery.
For the first time since 2022, China announced maritime exclusion zones, establishing eight zones around Taiwan, five of which overlapped Taiwan’s territorial waters, and conducted more than 200 air sorties. Live rounds were fired from Fujian province into waters roughly 44 kilometers off Taiwan’s coast, with 27 rockets launched in two waves. The drills disrupted civilian activity, forcing schedule changes to more than 100 flights and prompting repeated safety warnings from fishing associations.
The exercises simulated a blockade of key ports and infrastructure, particularly Kaohsiung, Keelung, and Hualien. China Coast Guard and PLA Navy coordination rehearsed civilian vessel interdiction under law-enforcement pretexts while supporting counter-intervention and area-denial operations against foreign forces. PLA and coast guard vessels operated deep inside Taiwan’s contiguous zone and near offshore islands, with missiles landing within 12–24 nautical miles of Taiwan.
The drills included the Type 075 landing helicopter dock Hainan, escorted by other PLAN vessels and coordinated with bomber formations to simulate anti-ship strikes east of Taiwan. A Type 071 landing platform dock also participated, rehearsing air assault, amphibious operations, and long-range rapid assaults. The PLA conducted rocket artillery drills using PHL-16 multiple launch rocket systems capable of striking targets across Taiwan if deployed on the mainland, while the naval deployment emphasized anti-submarine warfare through Type 054A frigates with upgraded sonar and helicopter-based ASW capabilities.
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said Taiwan would not escalate tensions but criticized Beijing’s behavior as irresponsible. Defense officials warned that the drills threatened regional stability, shipping lanes, air routes, and fishermen’s livelihoods. Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union issued statements urging restraint and peaceful resolution of cross-strait tensions.
The Pentagon’s 2025 China Military Power Report assessed that China aims to be capable of fighting and winning a war over Taiwan by the end of 2027, pursuing national total war concepts designed to overcome the United States through whole-of-nation mobilization.
PLA strike capabilities could extend 1,500–2,000 nautical miles from China, challenging U.S. presence across the Asia-Pacific. For the first time in decades, the Eastern, Southern, and Northern Theater Commands operated together during December 2025 exercises, demonstrating improved joint operations.
The report identified the DF-27 as a fielded conventional intercontinental ballistic missile capable of ranging the U.S. homeland, including Hawaii and Alaska, without nuclear payloads. China now fields the world’s largest hypersonic missile arsenal, including DF-17, YJ-21, and DF-27 variants.
Cyber operations such as Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon penetrated U.S. critical infrastructure in 2024, demonstrating capabilities that could disrupt U.S. military operations. China has surpassed 600 operational nuclear warheads and is on track to exceed 1,000 by 2030, with more than 100 solid-propellant ICBMs deployed in silos. China has also tripled its ISR satellite platforms since 2018. Despite widespread corruption purges within the PLA and defense industry, Beijing continues making progress toward its 2027 military modernization goals.
Beijing framed the drills as a warning to Taiwan independence forces and external actors, blaming Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party for heightened tensions and criticizing the $11 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan approved a week earlier. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also criticized recent comments by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi indicating Japan would not rule out military intervention if China attacked Taiwan.
President Trump said he had not been briefed in advance on the exercises but expressed little concern, citing his relationship with Xi Jinping and noting that China has conducted naval exercises in the region for decades. In general, President Trump’s nonchalance about the drills is appropriate. Beijing regularly threatens Taiwan, the United States, and Japan, so it should come as no surprise that it has done so again.
Similarly, China’s emphasis on a blockade is not unexpected. The PLA’s realistic military options for taking Taiwan are a blockade or an invasion, with the possibility of combining the two. While the exercises demonstrated a level of command, control, and inter-service integration that exceeded expectations in a war-game setting, China has no recent combat experience, and it remains unclear how the PLA would perform under real combat conditions.
It is also unknown whether PLA soldiers and the PRC population are willing to endure the deprivations a prolonged war would entail. A blockade of Taiwan would effectively function as a blockade of China itself, cutting off critical oil and food imports and severely damaging the economy by disrupting exports.
On the other hand, 2027 marks the 100th anniversary of the PLA, and Xi Jinping understands that if he is the leader who takes Taiwan, particularly in the PLA’s centennial year, he would secure a place in history alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, a legacy he is widely believed to covet.
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