Taiwan's war drills begin 5 August. China named no drill in reply to recent ones.

What happened

Taiwan’s drills will test relocating arms production while under Chinese attack — the next phase of a summer of escalating readiness exercises, with Han Kuang No. 42 scheduled for early August.

Han Kuang No. 42, Taiwan’s main yearly war drill, starts on 5 August. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense confirmed a new training calendar on 19 June. A five-day combat readiness drill started on 23 June, and a one-week joint defence exercise from 13 July led up to Han Kuang. The live-fire part of Han Kuang is expected to run for ten days and nine nights.

This year the drills test whether the whole of society can hold up, with the army and civilians working together. For the first time, military intelligence units also take part in the tabletop war games, where officers play out an attack on maps.

China spent June practising something else. Its new aircraft carrier, the Fujian, sailed through the Taiwan Strait for the third time on 23 June. China Coast Guard ships made repeated patrols into restricted waters around the Taiwanese islands of Pratas and Kinmen.

For the first time, at least two Chinese coast guard ships stayed without a break in the waters east of Taiwan that Taiwan claims as its own economic zone. Analysts read this as practice for a blockade, with the coast guard covering the strait and the navy covering the eastern approaches.

Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defence zone, the area where it asks aircraft to identify themselves, 134 times in June. That is down from an average of more than 300 a month after President Lai took office in May 2024.

Taipei is planning for that kind of pressure. On 25 June, government agencies ran tabletop exercises on a Chinese ‘quarantine’ at sea, a partial blockade, and practised what to do if the coast guard boards or holds ships.

The politics add to the tension. Han Kuo-yu, the speaker of Taiwan’s parliament, led a delegation of several parties to Washington from 21 to 26 June and came back on the first-ever direct commercial flight between Washington and Taipei. Taiwan’s local elections in November are already the target of a suspected Chinese network of fake social media accounts.

Sources: Reuters

The Pattern

None of the last five Han Kuang drills drew a named Chinese exercise. We looked at the named exercises China’s army has run around Taiwan since 2022 and asked what set each one off. Each came after a political moment in Taipei, such as a speech or a visit, and none after Taiwan’s own training calendar. The four exercises below are those named campaigns. The five Han Kuang drills are a separate count.

The Read

History points to no named exercise. In the last five Han Kuang cycles Beijing answered with none. Its current approach also costs less. Coast guard ships now stay east of the island, and a carrier sails through the strait while China calls it routine. This kind of pressure weakens Taiwan’s position without giving Taipei a moment to rally voters before the November elections. The 22 per cent on a named exercise and the 55 per cent on a middle-range aircraft count say the same thing: steady pressure, not a show of force.

Where history is weak: 2026 has no clean match. A coast guard presence that never leaves the eastern waters is new, and the Fujian sailed through in the middle of the drill season. Han Kuo-yu’s trip to Washington, which ended with a first direct commercial flight, is the kind of political moment that has set off named exercises before. If Beijing decides that the delegation and its flight, or Han Kuang’s US-style methods, change the status quo, its habit of answering politics with exercises points the other way.

A named exercise announced by China before 10 August would settle the first question.