(April 2): China conducted a second day of drills around Taiwan on Wednesday, adding to the unprecedented military pressure it is applying to Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, a leader it strongly dislikes.

The latest exercises, labelled Strait Thunder-2025A, were held in the central and southern parts of the Taiwan Strait, Chinese military spokesman Senior Colonel Shi Yi said in a statement. They tested the ability of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to conduct a blockade, and involved “precision strikes” on simulated targets including ports and energy facilities.

The PLA also held “long-range live-fire drills” in the East China Sea, Shi said, referring to the body of water north of Taiwan. The Shandong aircraft carrier task group travelled east of Taiwan’s main island as part of the manoeuvres, he said separately. The drills were completed on Wednesday, according to state-run China Central Television.

Some 37 Chinese aircraft crossed the mid-line in the strait, the Defense Ministry in Taipei said on X, adding that its own warplanes, ships and missile systems responded, without saying what that entailed. The airspace and waters around Taiwan were normal, a ministry spokesman said in an afternoon briefing.

The latest drills add to Beijing’s campaign of intimidation against Taipei, and come a day after exercises that involved the most naval warships in nearly a year. The PLA has now held at least seven sets of drills of varying intensity around Taiwan since Lai took office in May last year. That’s easily the most that any president of the archipelago has faced since democratic elections started some three decades ago. The PLA didn’t say when it planned to hold the B version of Strait Thunder-2025, but it is a clear sign that the PLA is preparing more drills.

“Targeted military exercises against Taiwan with a high degree of political coercion have surpassed those of previous administrations, at least in terms of frequency,” said Chieh Chung, adjunct associate research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei. 

The exercises are also aimed at Washington, Taipei’s main military backer, Chieh said, signalling “that if it doesn’t take Beijing’s stance and claims in the Taiwan Strait seriously, it will never be able to manage military risks between China and the US.”

Markets in Taiwan shrugged off the moves by the Chinese armed forces, with the benchmark Taiex gauge rising 0.1% for a second day of gains. The Taiwan dollar closed 0.3% higher, the biggest gain in nearly two months, at 33.09 versus the greenback.

China has held major high-profile exercises during past Taiwanese administrations, such after then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in 2022 when Tsai Ing-wen was the president. That episode involved China sending missiles over Taiwan, recalling a crisis in the mid-1990s precipitated by Taiwan’s president at the time, Lee Teng-hui, travelling to the US. And for years, the PLA has held regular drills closer to its own shores that practice manoeuvres like amphibious landings that would be crucial to any invasion of Taiwan.

Beijing has many reasons for holding the latest drills, including better weather in the strait at this time of year and responding to the Trump administration’s foreign policy coming into focus. The US has been encouraging Nato allies to step up their defence spending to counter Russia, while the US prioritises China. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a recent trip to Japan and the Philippines to pledge a range of military resources that allies require to counter the PLA.

In criticising the Tuesday drills, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement that Washington’s backing for allies and partners including Taiwan continued. The US “opposes unilateral changes to the status quo” in the strait, she said.

The PLA’s activity also comes after the US held drills with Japan and South Korea in the East China Sea last month. Those manoeuvres involved America’s Carl Vinson carrier strike group.

Despite its rhetoric, there is little sign that China is actually preparing to invade Taiwan soon, a move that would massively disrupt its own economy and that of its trade partners, let alone the supply chains for the advanced semiconductors that the archipelago specialises in making. Last month, Taiwanese Defense Minister Wellington Koo said the PLA wasn’t ready to execute a major amphibious operation. A running purge of China’s military also complicates the outlook for any major action by the PLA. 

When announcing drills over the past year, Beijing has increasingly singled out Lai, who it views as a separatist inching Taiwan closer to a red line it has indicated will lead a very harsh response: a public declaration of independence. A speech Lai gave last month laying out measures to curb spying in Taiwan while also referring to Beijing as a “foreign hostile force” seemed particularly irksome to Chinese officials, leading to them calling him “the creator of the Taiwan crisis”.

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang said on Wednesday the PLA’s military drills were aimed to showcase its capability to strike against “Taiwan independence” provocations and its will to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, according to a government statement. He added the PLA will continue to strengthen its combat readiness to counter separatism and foreign interference.

On Tuesday, the Beijing government department that handles Taiwan matters launched a direct verbal attack on Lai that’s emblematic of its increasingly dim view of him. It called him a “saboteur of cross-strait peace”, saying he had shown “his ugly features of being anti-peace, anti-exchange, anti-democracy and anti-humanism”. The PLA also published a poster depicting him as a “parasite poisoning Taiwan Island”.

“Lai is under unprecedented pressure, but it is also political, informational, as well as military,” said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “Beijing is making this very personal and is avoiding dealing with the underlying problem of the inflexibility in their own strategy and policy.”

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