A Chinese naval vessel near Dongju Island, Taiwan in 2023, during China's live-fire military drills. At least 11 Chinese missiles struck the seas to the north, south, and east of Taiwan, less than 24 hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island as a symbol of democracy in contrast to autocratic China in 2022. The People’s Liberation Army declared that its missiles had 'precisely hit their targets.'
Taiwan's 1,200-kilometer-long coastline presents a paradox: its rough waters serve as both a natural defense against potential invasion and a barrier to receiving allied support.
In December 2024, at the Port of Taipei, a massive cargo ship from Seattle unloaded 38 U.S.-made M1A2T tanks, a long-awaited boost to Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. This delivery, confirmed by Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, marked a significant milestone in the island's defense preparedness.
Just kilometers away, on Bali Beach, women in bikinis basked in the sunlight where tanks recently conducted anti-landing military exercises, firing at mock ships representing Chinese invaders. This beach is one of Taiwan’s 14 “red beaches,”— -potential invasion points identified in Ian Easton's 2017 study 'The Chinese Invasion Threat' where fishing ports, tourist attractions, and residential areas along the coastline could become targets for amphibious landings during wartime.
The number of Chinese warplanes crossing the informal boundary between China and Taiwan has hit a record high, with Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense reporting over 300 incursions every month from May to October 2024. Chinese coast guard vessels joined naval ships circling Taiwan, while fighter jets took off from an aircraft carrier stationed not far from Taiwan’s eastern coastline.
Taiwan has found itself at the crossroads of escalating geopolitical tensions, particularly due to mounting pressure from China, which continues to assert sovereignty over the self-governed island. These pressures are evident in intensified military drills, increased economic sanctions, and Taiwan’s responses to these challenges. Yet daily life continues along the coastline. Unlike Ukraine with its land borders to supporting nations, Taiwan's geographical isolation means any external assistance would need to cross substantial maritime distances
Red Beaches:
Life Along Taiwan's Defense Line
A soldier pretended to fall to the ground outside the oil depot he was guarding during the annual Han Kuang exercise in 2023. In response to the escalating tensions between China and Taiwan in recent years, the Taiwanese military incorporated real military conflict scenarios into the Han Kuang drills. The exercise shifted from traditional military camp training to more field-based operations, simulating urban environments and focusing on critical civil infrastructure at high risk of attack, such as airports and power stations.
Li Ming-che participated in a pro-democracy protest in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2022. Born and raised in Taiwan to parents who had fled mainland China, Li was a long-time sympathizer of China’s beleaguered democracy movement. He frequently discussed Taiwan’s experiences with democratization with people in China, and donated money and books to the families of imprisoned Chinese individuals, including human rights lawyers and political prisoners. For several years, he had traveled to mainland China without incident. However, on March 19, 2017, after Li entered the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, he was abruptly taken to a secret prison and interrogated about his work and his connections with civil society groups and government bodies in Taiwan. In late 2017, a Chinese court sentenced Li to five years in prison. In 2022, Li was released and returned to Taipei.
Military exercises in Taiwan in 2023. Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te has vowed to continue strengthening the island’s military, and some experts argue that Taiwan should extend conscription — which was recently increased to 12 months — to build a sufficient number of well-trained troops to deter Beijing. His new defense minister, Wellington Koo, has signaled his intent to reform the armed forces. He began by eliminating ceremonial formalities, such as goose-step marching in parades.
A Taiwanese warplane near Hsinchu Military Air Base in Taiwan in 2022. The Chinese warplanes, deployed in record numbers, crossed an informal boundary between China and Taiwan. Chinese Coast Guard boats joined naval ships in encircling Taiwan. Fighter jets took off from an aircraft carrier parked off the island’s east coast. The pressure campaign includes challenging Taiwan’s limits in the skies and the waters. Among the record 153 planes China flew toward the island, 111 crossed the so-called median line in the Taiwan Strait. Until several years ago, it was an informal boundary that they had rarely crossed. The coast guard also sent four boats into restricted waters near Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, close to mainland China.
Workers build the warship in a shipyard in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2022 . In December 2024, China conducted its largest maritime operations in nearly three decades, deploying nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels across a vast expanse of waters, from the southern Japanese islands to the South China Sea. Taiwanese defense officials pointed out that the scale of the deployment suggested China’s intention not only to demonstrate its ability to encircle the self-governed island, but also to prevent American allies in the region—such as Japan and the Philippines—from coming to Taiwan’s defense.
Tony Lu, who went and fought with the Ukrainian forces against the Russian Army.
Empty artillery shells from Chinese bombardments are displayed in a shop in Kinmen, Taiwan in 2021. During the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, 470,000 shells were fired over 44 days. By the time the shelling ceased in 1979, more than a million shells had struck Kinmen, resulting in significant casualties. Over the course of the conflict, more than 500 people were killed, and hundreds more were injured.
Hsieh Kun-sung, a pineapple farmer in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2022, said his business had been thriving since Taiwanese rallied in support after China stopped buying the fruit.
In recent years, Beijing has sent military aircraft toward the island almost daily. It has tried to isolate Taiwan, peeling off its few remaining diplomatic allies and blocking it from joining international organizations. It has also increasingly sought to restrict the island’s access to China’s vast consumer market, banning Taiwanese pineapples, then wax apples, after it said the fruits brought in pests.
Hou Yu-ih (C), the presidential candidate from the Kuomintang (KMT), who later lost the 2024 election, prays at a temple during his campaign in Taipei, Taiwan in 2024. The Nationalist candidate, Mr. Hou is a former police chief and currently the mayor of New Taipei. He has said that he wants to stabilize ties with China, while continuing to build up the military and maintain close ties with Washington. He accuses the D.P.P. of putting Taiwan’s security at risk by failing to create the conditions for talks with Beijing. A victory for Mr. Hou could attract a warmer reaction from Beijing. China would likely frame the win as a rebuke to pro-independence forces.
A young supporter waves flag during a campaign event of Lai Ching-te, presidential candidate for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in New Taipei City, Taiwan in 2024. The Democratic Progressive Party has tended to win most of the youth vote, but after two terms in power under President Tsai Ing-wen, it is no longer a fresh face. And many younger Taiwanese tend to see the opposition Nationalists as a party too caught in the past and too attached to China. Polls show that most Taiwanese people support maintaining the island’s ambiguous status quo and not risking Beijing’s wrath by pursuing outright independence. Yet surveys also indicate that fewer people see prospects for a peaceful agreement with China that they could accept.
Taiwan’s President-elect Lai Ching-te and his running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, wave to supporters after their victory in Taipei, Taiwan in 2024. The Taiwanese politician Lai Ching-te has for years been reviled by China’s Communist Party as a dangerous foe who, by its account, could drag the two sides into a war by pressing for full independence for his island democracy. When millions of Taiwanese voted for their next president, an official Beijing news outlet warned that Mr. Lai could take Taiwan “on a path of no return.” Yet, despite China’s months of menacing warnings of a “war or peace” choice for Taiwan’s voters, Mr. Lai was elected president.
Lawmakers from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the pro-China opposition Kuomintang (KMT) clashed during the third reading of amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act and other contentious legislation at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, Taiwan in 2024.
A replica of the Statue of Liberty at the seafront in Shimen, Taiwan in 2024. There were about 9,000 American soldiers in Taiwan in 1971 when a treaty ensured that the United States would defend Taiwan against any attacker. Then, rapidly, they were gone. Nixonian history is still baked into relations. After 1979, the United States developed a policy of “strategic ambiguity,” declining to commit outright to defending Taiwan, which China sees as lost territory. That means everything the United States does is closely watched through a lens of past and potential betrayal.
Li Yuan-hsin, right, with her husband and daughter at a day care center in Chiayi, Taiwan. Ms. Li is among the more than 60 percent of the island’s people who identify as solely Taiwanese. To her, the distinction is important. China may be the land of her ancestors, but Taiwan is where she was born and raised, a home she defines as much by its verdant mountains and bustling night markets as by its robust democracy. In high school, she had planted a little blue flag on her desk to show support for her preferred political candidate; since then, she has voted in every presidential election. Well over 90 percent of Taiwan’s people trace their roots to mainland China, but more than ever, they are embracing an identity that is distinct from that of their Communist-ruled neighbor. Beijing’s strident authoritarianism — and its claim over Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now central to a dispute that has turned the Taiwan Strait into one of Asia’s biggest potential flash points.
Ms. Wang, who fled the mainland decades ago, being Chinese is about celebrating her cultural and familial roots. She paints classical Chinese ink landscapes and displays them on the walls of her home. She spends hours practicing the erhu, a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument. She recounts stories of a land so beloved that her grandparents brought a handful of soil with them when they left. She still wonders what happened to the gold and silver bars they had buried beneath a heated brick bed in Beijing. Ms. Wang was nine when she landed in Taiwan in 1948, part of the one million or so Chinese who retreated with the Nationalists during China’s Civil War with the Communists. Ms. Wang and other mainlanders who yearned to return to China had always been a minority in Taiwan. But a few generations later, among their children and grandchildren, that longing has morphed into a fear of Beijing’s expansive ambitions. Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has signaled its impatience with Taiwan in increasingly menacing ways, sending military jets to buzz Taiwanese on a near-daily basis.
People take pictures with military vehicles at Taiwan's national day in Taoyuan, Taiwan in 2022. Most of Taiwan’s residents are not interested in becoming absorbed by a Communist-ruled China. But they are not pushing for formal independence for the island, either, preferring to avoid the risk of war. It leaves both sides at a dangerous impasse. The more entrenched Taiwan’s identity becomes, the more Beijing may feel compelled to intensify its military and diplomatic campaign to pressure the island into respecting its claim of sovereignty.
A smaller version of the "Pillar of Remembrance" was unveiled in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2022. In recent years, Hong Kong universities have demolished prominent Tiananmen memorials, including the original "Pillar of Remembrance. For decades, a large candlelight vigil was held in Hong Kong every June 4 to honor those killed when Chinese soldiers crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. On a Saturday in 2022, smaller crowds gathered in Taipei and other cities around the world, not only mourning those slain in 1989 but also the fate of Hong Kong. The suppression of dissent in the city has effectively ended the vigil at Victoria Park, the world’s most prominent public memorial to the victims of the Tiananmen massacre.
The Tamsui River in front of Taipei’s skyline in Taiwan in 2023, where the Taiwan Strait connects to the Tamsui River, is one of the key strategic locations that Taiwan’s military focuses on to prevent a potential invasion by China. This is because advancing through the Tamsui River would lead to Taipei’s city center within 20 minutes, and the Presidential Office is less than 10 kilometers away. In 2024, a former captain of a People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel boarded a mother ship off Taiwan’s western coast and later piloted a speedboat straight toward the heavily guarded Tamsui River area. He eventually docked at the Tamsui Ferry Terminal, where he was immediately arrested by coast guard personnel. He claimed that he had undertaken this journey to seek freedom in Taiwan. However, Taiwan’s military did not believe his statement, and the incident heightened awareness among the Taiwanese people.
Defense Industry Exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan in 2023. American officials are intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan after studying recent naval and air force exercises by the Chinese military around the island, according to current and former officials. The exercises showed that China would probably blockade the island as a prelude to any attempted invasion, and Taiwan would have to hold out on its own until the United States or other nations intervened, if they decided to do that, the current and former officials say. U.S. officials increasingly emphasize Taiwan’s need for smaller, mobile weapons that can be lethal against Chinese warships and jets while being able to evade attacks, which is central to so-called asymmetric warfare.
A bunker that has been converted into a temple in Keelung, Taiwan in 2022. There are nearly 700 bomb shelters in this city of 360,000 people. which suffered its first foreign attack, by the Dutch, in 1642 — the landscape has been carved up for protection. For many in Keelung, past and present threats blur. In recent months, China has increased the frequency and intensity of military drills off Taiwan’s coast. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has also become more vocal about unification with Taiwan, reserving the right to use force.
Sinan Jipehngaya, 50, a Tao woman in Lanyu Island, Taiwan in 2022. Today, ethnic Han Chinese make up more than 95 percent of Taiwan’s population of 23 million. The roughly 583,000 Indigenous people, by contrast, constitute 2 percent, and many still face widespread social and economic marginalization. The movement for greater Indigenous rights has gained traction in recent years as Taiwan, a self-governed territory claimed by Beijing, pushes a distinct identity separate from mainland China. In 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan became the first leader to formally apologize to the island’s Indigenous people for centuries of “pain and mistreatment.”
Tanks participate in an anti-landing drill on Bali beach during the Han Kuang military exercise in New Taipei city, Taiwan in 2023. Bali beach is one of 14 “red beaches” around Taiwan where a Chinese invasion is most likely in the event of a cross-strait war, according to international analysts. Taiwan's coastline is about 1,200 kilometers long, and half of the coastline is piled up on cement wave-absorbing blocks. Amid the escalating tensions in Taiwan Strait, 14 "red beaches" have been designated by Taiwan's Ministry of Defense. These include fresh fish ports, tourist spots, and residential areas, where could be potential large-scale amphibious landing during wartime. The ministry has launched several mass anti-landing exercises.
Robert Tsao, founder of United Microelectronics Corporation. in his office at Taipei, Taiwan in 2023. Taiwan is the biggest producer of the world’s most advanced chips. It is also rapidly becoming one of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical flash points. The fear is that in the event of a conflict, firms won’t get the microchips they need to make phones and drones, set up supercomputers and cellular networks, and even build new weapons. Some top semiconductor leaders have spoken out against China after the military drills in 2022. Robert Tsao, the founder of Taiwan’s second-largest chip manufacturer, United Microelectronics, said he would donate $100 million to Taiwan’s military following the exercises. Long seen as friendly to China, Mr. Tsao said in an interview that things had changed. “They will bring no progress, only destruction,” he said of China’s Communist Party. He also spoke out against the trend in recent years of Taiwanese semiconductor engineers going to work for Chinese companies for large salaries, saying they were “servicing the Chinese Communist Party.”
Civilians participating in a battle simulation during a training workshop near Taipei, Taiwan in 2022. Since the war in Ukraine began, a growing number of Taiwanese have been making their own preparations for war. As Taiwan democratized in the late 1980s, newly elected officials cut the defense budgets, leading to a shrinking force. Taiwan has only around 169,000 active-duty military personnel and around 2 million reservists, compared with China’s two million active-duty soldiers. The new urgency reflects a sharp change in attitudes in Taiwan, where many had long been indifferent to China’s advances, resigned to defeat or blindly optimistic about support from the United States. A trained civilian force could be the “tip of the spear” in Taiwan’s defense, said Enoch Wu, founder of Forward Alliance, a nongovernmental group that holds civil defense workshops. “That’s what’s going to make or break Taiwan.”
Participants in a combat medic training session learned how to use a tourniquet to stop bleeding from a wound in Taipei, Taiwan in 2022. About two dozen people simulated a gunfight in a parking lot near Taipei in a class run by PolarLight, a company that teaches basic first aid and shooting skills, using realistic airsoft guns. They crept around parked cars and buses, aiming their airsoft rifles at imaginary opponents. Some fell to the ground, while others rushed in to move them to safety and apply tourniquets. Danny Shi, a 21-year-old student at a military academy, said that he had signed up because he was worried that he was not getting enough practical experience at school. He said he wanted to be ready for the worst. “As a Taiwanese person,” he said, “I think we should be more serious about preparing for war.”
Rescue workers taking part in an exercise simulating buildings and public transportation being attacked by Chinese missiles in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 2022. Taiwan spends billions on fighter jets and submarines, yet its conscripts barely get enough ammunition for training. The mandatory military service is seen by many as too short, and the reservist program, insufficiently rigorous. The military is building a professional force, but has struggled to recruit and retain highly skilled soldiers. We cannot wait; we are competing with time,” said Michael Tsai, a former defense minister of Taiwan. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened in an instant — who knows when the P.L.A. might choose to invade Taiwan.”
King Boat Burning Ceremony on a beach in Donggang in Taiwan in 2024. The festival is held once every three years, a 13-meter finely crafted ancient warship made of paper and wood and equipped with 10 cannons. The original meaning of burning the King Boat was to send the plague out of the country, but today it has evolved into an activity for praying for peace and blessings.