Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis

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[entity.propose id="country:china" type="country" name="China" lon=104.195 lat=35.861]
[entity.propose id="strait:taiwan_strait" type="strait" name="Taiwan Strait" lon=119.5 lat=24.5]
[entity.propose id="city:taipei" type="city" name="Taipei" lon=121.565 lat=25.033]
[entity.propose id="strait:luzon_strait" type="strait" name="Luzon Strait" lon=121.5 lat=20.5]
[map.highlight ids="country:taiwan" color="#38bdf8"]
[map.highlight ids="country:china" color="#ef4444"]
On December 29, China launched its most extensive military exercise around Taiwan in history — ninety warships, sixty air sorties, and missiles landing inside Taiwan's own territorial buffer zone for the first time. The People's Liberation Army called it Justice Mission 2025. Analysts called it a dress rehearsal.
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[map.label ids="strait:taiwan_strait" text="Taiwan Strait — 44 of 60 sorties crossed the median line"]
[chat.say source="global_taiwan_institute_justice_mission_2026"]
This was the eighth major drill China has run around Taiwan since 2022, and the largest by every measure: most ships deployed, most airframes committed, and the first exercise to put live missiles inside Taiwan's twenty-four-nautical-mile contiguous zone — ten of twenty-seven missiles fired on day two landed there.
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[scene.title kind=chapter eyebrow="Clio Short" title="The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis" subtitle="Justice Mission 2025 · December 2025 · 90 Ships, 60 Sorties, Missiles in the Buffer Zone"]
[chat.say source="csis_fourth_strait_crisis_military"]
The drill rehearsed three things simultaneously: establishing air superiority over the strait, blockading Taiwan's four major ports, and deterring any US carrier group from entering through the Luzon Strait. Eleven PLA Navy warships and eight coast guard vessels entered Taiwan's contiguous zone — the first time in recorded history China has done that at scale.
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[map.label ids="strait:luzon_strait" text="Luzon Strait — rehearsed US entry denial"]
[chat.say source="defense_news_taiwan_blockade_test_2026"]
China's message to Washington was embedded in the timing: the drill happened two weeks after the US seized Venezuela's government and removed Maduro. Beijing watched that operation carefully — and the Taiwan exercise was in part a signal that whatever the US just demonstrated in Caracas, China is studying for Taipei.
[scene.title kind=clear]
Taiwan has spent seventy-five years relying on the Taiwan Strait as a geographic moat and the United States as an offshore balancer. Justice Mission 2025 compressed both into a twenty-four-hour window to test whether those guarantees still hold. The fourth crisis is not over. China has normalized contiguous zone entries. The next drill does not start from where this one ended — it starts from where this one normalized.
[scene.title kind=outro title="Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis" subtitle="Follow Clio for more."]