Sustained military or coercive efforts, each grouping the events that belong to it. Campaigns exist so a timeline of thirty entries reads as three or four arcs — and so an event can be understood as part of something rather than on its own. Status describes where a campaign stands, never who is winning. This module also publishes records that are not observed operations: a plan a party has declared, or a contingency Vigil assesses. They are grouped separately, labelled on every surface, and carry no status — because nothing about them is happening.
Longer conscription, a bigger budget and a slow argument about whether to buy a conventional military or an inconvenient one.
Since 20224 phases3 linked eventsConfidence: HighStatus as of 2026-07Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. This is the variable Taiwan actually controls. The pressure campaign is not something Taipei can decide to stop; the composition, size and readiness of its own forces and the resilience of its civil systems are. The programme is also the clearest available evidence about how Taiwan's own leadership and public assess their situation — conscription extension in particular carried a real domestic political cost, and paying it is more informative than any statement. For the module's other views it is the link between the military picture and the civil-resilience material, because the same programme covers both.
A campaign whose object is not territory but the definition of normal — and which is measured in daily reports rather than in ground taken.
Intensifying since 20204 phases6 linked eventsConfidence: HighStatus as of 2026-07Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. This is the actual conflict in this module: not a war that might happen but a campaign that is happening, whose currency is expectations. Each increment makes the previous one unremarkable, which is why the median line's erosion matters more than any single crossing. It also imposes real and continuous costs — on Taiwanese air defence readiness, on the civil systems that respond, and on regional shipping and aviation — without ever presenting a moment at which anyone must respond. Understanding the pressure campaign is the precondition for understanding why deterrence rather than defence is the subject of this module.
Three confrontations across four decades that established what the strait's participants would and would not actually do — and that have never been repeated.
1954 – 19963 phases4 linked eventsConfidence: HighStatus as of 1996-03Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. These are the only data points. Every assessment of what the participants would do under pressure — including the assessments in this module — is ultimately calibrated against three episodes, the most recent of which is thirty years old and occurred under a different military balance, a different Taiwanese political system and a different global economy. That thinness of the evidence base is the single most important caveat on all forward-looking analysis of this dispute, and it is why this module publishes so little of it.
The one contingency with enough evidence behind it to describe: interference with what arrives by sea, on a spectrum from inspection to closure.
Vigil’s description of what a contingency would involve, published because the question is asked. Nothing here is occurring, nobody has declared it in this form, and it is not a forecast. The record states what it rests on and what would change it.
0 phases2 linked eventsConfidence: ModerateStatus as of 2026-06Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. This is where the module's military, economic and civil-resilience content meet, and it is the question readers actually arrive with. Describing it carefully — with the classification visible, the basis stated and the non-claims explicit — is the alternative to leaving it to sources that will supply a timeline and a casualty figure. It also matters because the spectrum's lower end is not hypothetical: coast guard inspection around the outlying islands is happening now, which means the distinction between observed pressure and assessed contingency runs through this subject rather than around it.
What Beijing has actually written down about unification — and what the text does and does not commit anyone to.
A concept a party has publicly declared or published. Vigil records that the declaration exists and who made it. It is NOT a statement that anything is being executed, prepared or intended on any timescale.
0 phases2 linked eventsConfidence: HighStatus as of 2026-06Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. These texts are the reference point every other actor in the module plans against, and they are frequently paraphrased inaccurately in both directions — described either as a timetable, which they are not, or as empty rhetoric, which underplays that they are law. Recording what the instruments actually say, with citations, gives a reader a way to check any characterisation they encounter elsewhere. The Article 8 conditions in particular are undefined, and their undefinedness is the analytically significant feature: it is what makes the framework simultaneously a standing commitment and a source of ambiguity.
Context, not targeting. Campaign records describe objectives, participants, phases and outcomes at the level of published analysis. They contain no current positions, force ratios, unit locations or strengths — those classes of content have no fields in Vigil's schemas. See the methodology.