Fifteen-Fold in Five Years.
China Made the Taiwan Strait a Daily Rehearsal.
In 2020, Taiwan tracked 380 Chinese military sorties in and around the Taiwan Strait. In 2025 it tracked 5,709 — a rise of just over fifteen times in five years, according to a report the ruling Democratic Progressive Party released on February 2, 2026. What was once a sporadic show of force is now a near-daily fact of life.
The escalation is not just volume. Beijing has erased the Taiwan Strait median line, staged three named blockade-rehearsal exercises in eighteen months, dropped live rockets inside Taiwan’s contiguous zone for the first time, and flown a drone over Taiwanese territory for what analysts call the first confirmed airspace violation in decades. Taiwan’s own defense report calls the campaign what it is: gray-zone coercion, designed to wear the island down below the threshold of war.
For the United States, the stakes are not abstract. A single company on that island, TSMC, makes more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. A blockade would not just decide Taiwan’s fate; it would seize the supply chain that runs the American economy. Here is what the numbers show, and why they matter far beyond the strait.
- 15×increasePLA sorties around Taiwan, 2020 (380) to 2025 (5,709) — DPP Dept. of China Affairs
- 5,709sortieslogged in 2025 — a record high — DPP report / Taiwan MND
- 90warplanesacross the median line in one day, Justice Mission-2025 (Dec. 30, 2025) — Taiwan MND
- 153aircraftsingle-day record, Joint Sword-2024B (Oct. 14, 2024) — Taiwan MND
On February 2, 2026, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Department of China Affairs published a five-year tally of Chinese military flights around Taiwan. The trend line is nearly vertical: 380 sorties in 2020, 960 in 2021, 1,738 in 2022, 4,734 in 2023, 5,107 in 2024, and 5,709 in 2025. That is a rise of just over fifteen times — from a few flights a week to more than fifteen a day, every day, for a year.
The DPP framed the numbers bluntly, warning that the scale and tempo of the operations show Beijing has made the Taiwan Strait a core arena for its gray-zone campaign.
“Such actions turn Beijing's intentions toward Taiwan into concrete military plans, revealing its expansionist ambitions and posing a serious threat to peace in the Indo-Pacific region.”
DPP Department of China Affairs · report of February 2, 2026 · via Taiwan News
Two numbers get thrown around, and they are not the same. Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) is a monitoring buffer, not sovereign airspace — a country announces it can identify and track aircraft there. The Taiwan Strait median line is the unofficial midpoint boundary the United States drew in 1954; for decades both sides tacitly respected it. Beijing has spent the last four years erasing it.
That is why the counts diverge. The DPP’s broad tally of flights in and around the strait reaches 5,709 for 2025. CSIS’s ChinaPower project, which counts only aircraft that actually entered the ADIZ, logs 3,764 ADIZ incursions in 2025 — itself a 22.4 percent jump over 2024. CSIS also found that from May 2024 through December 2025, monthly PLA air incursions averaged 319, a 129 percent increase over the January 2022–April 2024 average. Different methods, one direction.
The median line tells the sharpest story. The Jamestown Foundation, working from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense data, counted 805 aircraft crossing the median line in 2024 — and noted that since President Lai Ching-te took office in May 2024, more than 300 sorties a month cross it on average. A boundary that held for roughly seventy years is now crossed by the hundreds, monthly, as a matter of routine.
Drawn in 1954 by U.S. Air Force General Benjamin Davis, the median line split the 110-mile-wide strait down the middle. It was never a treaty — just a line both militaries chose not to cross.
Beijing formally rejected it in 2020, and after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit, PLA aircraft began crossing it at will. CSIS recorded 564 median-line crossings in 2022 alone — more than 24 times the total in all the years before the Pelosi visit combined.
The effect is strategic, not symbolic. Erasing the line halves Taiwan’s early-warning time and normalizes PLA aircraft operating within minutes of the island — the exact posture a surprise attack would need.
The daily incursions are the baseline. On top of them sit the named exercises — each one a rehearsal for encircling and choking the island. Three in eighteen months escalated in scope, aggression, and proximity.
Launched days after Lai’s National Day speech, the drill set a single-day record: 153 PLA aircraft detected near Taiwan in 24 hours, alongside naval and coast-guard vessels rehearsing a blockade. It remains the largest one-day count on record.
Over two days the PLA deployed 135 aircraft, 38 naval vessels, and 12 China Coast Guard vessels. For the first time the exercise explicitly simulated strikes on Taiwan’s energy infrastructure — LNG terminals and ports — and pushed deeper into Taiwanese waters than earlier drills. Its stated pretext: Lai’s March 13 speech labeling China a “hostile foreign force.”
The largest war game by area since 2022. Taiwan detected 130 PLA aircraft and 14 navy ships in 24 hours, with 90 aircraft crossing the median line. The PLA fired 27 rockets; 10 landed within Taiwan’s 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone — the closest-ever Chinese live-fire to the island. Drill zones breached the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea. The trigger, per Beijing: a record U.S. arms sale.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense narrates all of this in real time on its public feed, posting a running count of aircraft, ships, and median-line crossings every morning.
130 PLA aircraft, 14 PLAN vessels and 8 official ships detected around Taiwan in 24 hours, with 90 of the sorties crossing the median line and entering Taiwan's northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ. Our forces monitored the situation and responded accordingly.
The point of flying fifteen sorties a day is not any one sortie. It is exhaustion. Taiwan’s 2025 National Defense Report names gray-zone harassment as the most immediate and complex threat Beijing poses — low-intensity, deniable, quasi-military pressure that stays just below the line that would trigger a war or an allied response.
The doctrine has a name: salami slicing. No single crossing is worth going to war over, so each is tolerated. But every crossing that draws no response becomes the new normal, and the next slice starts from there. Erase the median line, and territorial waters become the next frontier. Cross those, and sovereign airspace is next.
That next slice may already have landed. In January 2026, a PLA reconnaissance drone flew over Pratas (Dongsha) Island, Taiwanese-held territory in the South China Sea — what analysts at the American Enterprise Institute described as possibly the first confirmed PLA violation of Taiwanese territorial airspace in decades. The likely purpose, they wrote, was to test Taiwan’s response to a genuine airspace violation without provoking escalation. That is the salami slicer’s method exactly: find the edge, cross it slightly, see who flinches.
A free and open Indo-Pacific benefits everyone. USINDOPACOM continues to monitor PLA activity in the Taiwan Strait and operates alongside allies and partners to preserve regional stability and deter coercion.
President Lai Ching-te — who took office in May 2024 and has taken a harder line on Beijing than his predecessor, labeling China a “hostile foreign force” — has tried to answer the pressure with money and resilience. In November 2025 he pledged to raise defense spending toward 5 percent of GDP by 2030 and proposed a special defense budget of roughly $40 billion (NT$1.25 trillion) over eight years for missile defense, long-range precision weapons, and unmanned systems.
It has stalled at home. The opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which together control Taiwan’s legislature, have repeatedly voted to block or freeze Lai’s special budget — a gridlock NPR reported in January 2026 even as the incursions intensified. Lai has leaned instead on his Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee, launched in June 2024 to harden civilian infrastructure, energy, communications, and evacuation readiness for a blockade scenario.
“Foreign aggressors have stepped up measures to infiltrate Taiwan — through cognitive warfare, gray-zone tactics, and espionage.”
President Lai Ching-te · March 2025, on China's escalating pressure campaign
The report itself is candid about the mismatch: Taiwan cannot match the PLA plane-for-plane, so its stated strategy is asymmetric deterrence — many cheap, survivable, mobile weapons that make a blockade or invasion costly rather than trying to win a symmetrical air war it cannot afford.
The United States has no treaty obligation to defend Taiwan. Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, Washington commits to help Taiwan defend itself and to treat any coercion of the island as a matter of grave concern — but deliberately does not say whether it would fight. That is strategic ambiguity: a decades-old bet that uncertainty deters both a Chinese attack and a Taiwanese declaration of independence.
The ambiguity is doing a lot of work, and the salami-slicing tactic is engineered to exploit it. A gray-zone blockade that never fires the first shot at an American vessel is precisely the scenario in which “grave concern” is hardest to convert into action — which is why the incursion count is a strategic indicator, not a curiosity.
TSMC — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — makes more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, the chips inside every smartphone, data center, weapons system, and AI model on both sides of the Pacific.
Analysts estimate that a full halt to Taiwan’s chip exports would knock multiple percentage points off global GDP and ripple through every advanced-manufacturing sector for years. Some argue this “silicon shield” deters Beijing, which also depends on TSMC. Others note a blockade need not destroy the fabs — only control who they serve.
Either way, the arithmetic is stark: the sorties climbing 15-fold over five years are circling the single most economically consequential island on earth.
Multiple international news outlets reported the December drills as a deliberate response to a record U.S. arms sale — the clearest sign that Beijing reads American support as the variable it most wants to test and, over time, deter.
China deployed dozens of fighter aircraft and warships and fired live rockets around Taiwan in 'Justice Mission-2025' drills simulating a blockade of the island's key ports, days after Washington approved a record arms sale to Taipei.
Fifteen times as many flights in five years is not noise — it is a strategy running on schedule. Each sortie is too small to answer, and that is the design. Beijing has already erased the median line, rehearsed the blockade three times, and put a drone over Taiwanese soil to see who blinks. The line that decides whether the twenty-first century is stable or not runs through a 110-mile strait — and the chart, every year, points the same direction.
