What this campaign was
Sustained military, coast guard and economic pressure around Taiwan, conducted continuously and below the threshold that would compel a response. Its achievement is the erosion of the median line and the normalisation of activity that was newsworthy a few years ago.
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.
Confidence: High As of 2026-10Reviewed 2026-10-29
Summary
The People's Republic of China conducts sustained military and paramilitary activity around Taiwan, reported daily by Taiwan's defence ministry: aircraft operating in the air defence identification zone, naval vessels around the island, and coast guard patrols around the outlying islands. The pattern intensified from 2020, escalated sharply around the August 2022 Pelosi visit — after which the unwritten median line ceased to function as a restraint — and has since become the baseline rather than the exception. Large exercises follow political events, including the May 2024 inauguration and the Justice Mission-2025 exercises of late December 2025, the eighth major exercise since 2022. Coast guard patrolling around Kinmen began in February 2024, applying a law-enforcement rather than a military framing to presence in contested waters, and from June 2026 standing coast guard patrols were established east of the island as well. The air and naval pictures have diverged since December 2025: detected air activity fell from about 270 sorties in January 2026 to 173 in March, against 431 in March 2025, while naval detections held at roughly 7.2 vessels a day inside the range that characterised 2025. Air activity tracks political calendars; naval presence behaves more like a standing floor. Alongside the military activity run economic measures — coercive and, at Kinmen, increasingly inducement-shaped — diplomatic isolation and information operations.
Stated objectives
What the participants say. Each entry cites where the position was stated; Vigil records that it was made, not that it is true.
Beijing describes its military activity as necessary responses to "separatist" actions and to external interference, and asserts that the strait is not international water.
Taiwan describes the activity as coercion intended to exhaust its defences and normalise encroachment, and publishes daily figures for that reason.
Assessed objectives
Vigil's reading, graded. Kept structurally apart from stated positions so an assessment can never be published as someone's declared aim.
The operative objective is normalisation rather than any single outcome: each level of activity, once routine, becomes the baseline from which the next increment is measured.
The use of coast guard rather than naval units around Kinmen is a deliberate framing choice, placing presence in a law-enforcement category that is harder to answer militarily.
Cost imposition on Taiwanese readiness is an effect and is plausibly an objective, but Vigil grades this low: the inference rests on the activity pattern rather than on anything stated or documented.
Primary forces
- PLA Eastern Theater Command Primary force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
- PLA Air Force Primary force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
- PLA Navy Primary force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
Opposing forces
- ROC Air Force Opposing force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
- ROC Navy Opposing force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
- Taiwan Coast Guard Administration Opposing force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
Supporting & external
- China Coast Guard Supporting force · Confidence: High · as of 2026-06
The Kinmen patrols from February 2024 are the clearest case of law-enforcement framing applied to a contested-waters presence.
Reported participants
- PRC maritime militia structures Reported participant · Confidence: Low · as of 2026-06
Maritime militia participation is reported by analysts and is not officially acknowledged; recorded as reported rather than established.
Intensification and the first sustained increase
Air defence identification zone activity increased substantially and became a daily published figure rather than an occasional report, establishing the reporting regime through which the campaign is now observed.
The median line stops functioning
Exercises following the Pelosi visit were the largest in decades and included announced closure areas. Median-line crossings, previously individually newsworthy, became routine afterwards — the campaign's single most consequential achievement.
Coast guard patrolling and the outlying islands
China Coast Guard patrols began around Kinmen following a fatal incident involving a Chinese vessel, extending regular presence into waters close to Taiwan-administered islands under a law-enforcement framing.
A higher baseline, and variation within it
Activity levels varied around the post-2022 baseline rather than rising monotonically. Undersea cable damage in the same period raised civil-infrastructure questions with attribution contested in every case, and Japanese statements on a Taiwan contingency in late 2025 drew sustained PRC economic and informational pressure on Japan.
A peak in December, and a quieter air picture after it
The Justice Mission-2025 exercises of 29–31 December 2025 were the eighth major exercise around Taiwan since August 2022 and the closest: several announced areas overlapped waters Taiwan claims as territorial sea, though no PRC vessel entered them, and around ten rockets are reported to have impacted within the contiguous zone. Coast guard vessels operated inside the joint exercise, 13 detected on the first day and 15 on the second. Detected air activity has fallen since — roughly 270 sorties in January 2026, 190 in February and 173 in March, against 431 in March 2025 — while naval presence held steady at about 7.2 vessels a day in March, inside the 5–9 range that characterised 2025. The two domains are not moving together, and reading the air decline as de-escalation ignores the naval floor underneath it. Effort also shifted rather than stopped: from June 2026 the coast guard established standing patrols east of Taiwan, rotating a second named task group in on 4 July.
The coast guard lane widens, and stays a lane
The pressure Taiwan measured in the second half of 2026 ran through the coast guard, not the air lane. Taiwanese coast guard reporting put Chinese government-vessel presence around the island at a record — 244 government vessels in the published count for July, close to eight a day — while entries into Kinmen's restricted waters held at the roughly four-a-month pattern established since early 2024, with two-hour entries on 9 and 13 October and none reported from 14 to 24 October. Pratas became the newer point of contact: twelve expulsions of Chinese coast guard ships in 2026 to 20 October, with fifteen ship-sorties, the last by a cutter sailing with its AIS off. On 18 October coast guard, research and fishing vessels operated in four areas on one day — east of Hualien, south of Pingtung, south-west of Kaohsiung and at Pratas — the widest single-day geography on the record; on 22 October five Chinese coast guard ships followed eight Japan Coast Guard ships sheltering from a typhoon along the strait's median line, which Taipei called an assertion of jurisdiction and Beijing did not comment on. The Taiwan Affairs Office called the Pratas patrols lawful law-enforcement inspection patrols on 21 October and announced no widening. The last Chinese announcement of the eastern patrol found is dated 3 September, and no third task group has been reported. Through all of it the threshold held: no boarding, no inspection of a vessel bound for a main port and no closure area. The PLA air lane stayed in pattern, designated joint combat readiness patrols running at two to four a month, thirty-one for the year to 24 October, with no named exercise after Justice Mission-2025.
Outcome and present status
Ongoing and, on its own terms, partially successful. The median line no longer restrains anything and regular presence around the outlying islands has been established, both of which are durable changes achieved without a shot. It has not produced any movement in Taiwan's political position, has coincided with increased Taiwanese defence spending and conscription reform, and has hardened rather than softened regional attitudes in Japan and the Philippines. The campaign's achievements and its costs to its author are both real.
Observed adaptations
Substitution of coast guard for naval units in the outlying-island patrols, which changes the legal and escalatory character of an otherwise identical presence.
Taiwan's shift to publishing daily activity figures, which converted a diffuse pressure campaign into a measurable one and is itself a counter-move in the information dimension.
Japanese and Philippine reporting and basing decisions responding to activity in the channels, extending the campaign's political effects beyond the two principals.
Political implications
The campaign's real currency is what counts as normal, which makes its effects cumulative and hard to reverse without an explicit decision.
Military implications
Imposes continuous readiness costs on Taiwan without presenting a moment at which a response is required — the defining problem of grey-zone coercion.
Economic implications
Announced closure areas and cable incidents both reach commercial shipping and connectivity, which is how a military campaign becomes an insurance question.
Linked events
Locations
Places this module already publishes as map markers, listed because the campaign is about them. Not an operational area.
What remains unknown
- Activity figures are published by one party and are not independently verified. Counting methods have also changed over time, which complicates trend comparison.
- No current dispositions, force levels or unit locations are published by this module and none are the basis of any claim here.
- Attribution for the undersea cable incidents has not been established in any case.
- Maritime militia participation is reported by analysts rather than acknowledged, and its scale is not measurable from open sources.
Readings the evidence also supports
- Exercise and patrol activity can be read as coercive signalling, as routine training an expanding military would conduct regardless, or as responses to specific political events. All three are advanced by serious analysts, they are not mutually exclusive, and activity data alone does not separate them. **This module does not treat exercise activity as preparation for invasion: that inference requires evidence of intent which does not exist in the public record, and drawing it from capability and tempo alone is precisely the error the module's classification model exists to prevent.**
- The 2026 return toward pre-2024 activity levels can be read as de-escalation, as resource constraint, or as consolidation of gains already made — a baseline does not need reinforcing once it is accepted. Reporting supports all three and the module does not adjudicate between them.
- Cable damage can be read as deliberate grey-zone action or as the ordinary consequence of heavy anchor traffic in busy shallow water, where such damage is common worldwide.
Listed because the record's own assessment is not the only one its sources permit — not as a hedge on the assessment above.
Watch questions this campaign bears on
Standing analytical questions whose evidence runs through this campaign, each with its latest review. Derived from the Watch object, never restated here.
- EconomicAre commercial operators repricing Taiwan risk?
- Civil ResilienceCan communications and civil systems function under disruption?
- PoliticalDoes the declared unification framework move from law to enforcement?
- MilitaryHas detected activity moved off the post-Justice-Mission baseline?
- MilitaryIs coast guard activity becoming sustained enforcement rather than signalling?
- DiplomaticIs Japan's Taiwan-contingency posture becoming institutional?
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Assessed as of — 2026-10 Last reviewed — 2026-10-29