Mainland China stepping up preparations for Taiwan blockade, report says

Taiwan’s defence ministry has warned that the People’s Liberation Army is stepping up its preparations for a blockade of the island, adding that it is sharpening its plans to break such a cordon in response.
The assessment was made in the ministry’s “2026 China Military Power Report”, which was submitted to the legislature this week along with its five-year force development plan and next year’s proposed defence budget.
The report said recent PLA exercises were increasingly focused on the “joint blockade and control” of the island’s external air and sea routes.
“Combined with annual PLA training, the exercises have increasingly focused on maritime and air blockades or quarantines, joint firepower strikes, seizure of comprehensive battlefield superiority and joint amphibious landing operations,” it said.
The aim was to strengthen the PLA’s ability to target Taiwan, as well as carry out anti-access and area-denial operations to counter potential foreign intervention, the report continued.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China and has never ruled out the use of force to reunite it with the mainland.
Most countries, including the island’s main international partner the United States, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take it by force and is legally bound to supply it with weapons to defend itself.
The report also said targeted exercises had simulated blockades or quarantines, military-law enforcement operations and long-range live-fire strikes.
Meanwhile, the PLA continued to send warplanes and drones across the median line – a nominal boundary dividing the two sides of the Taiwan Strait – and warships had approached waters near the island’s contiguous zone, which extends 24 nautical miles (44km) beyond its coast.
To counter such threats, Taiwan’s military said it would strengthen its C5ISR (command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) networks and use AI-assisted systems as part of its decision-making process.

The island has also begun testing how it would counter a PLA blockade in practice.
During this year’s Han Kuang exercises, the island’s largest annual war games, countering a maritime quarantine and blockade played a central role for the first time.
In one scenario, Taiwan’s western ports and shipping routes were assumed to have been blockaded, forcing foreign assistance and critical supplies to enter through a “strategic lifeline” off the east coast.
In an exercise designed to test the coastguard’s integration into naval command-and-control structures, a Yung Feng-class minesweeper was used to clear a shipping route.
Navy and coastguard ships then formed a protective screen around a landing platform dock playing the role of a merchant vessel carrying vital supplies.
The exercise also tested the island’s ability to sustain its forces during a blockade by using ground forces to secure ports on the east coast of the island, while civilian trucks and heavy port equipment were mobilised to unload and transport supplies inland.
Other exercises simulated the relocation of defence production after an attack and the use of civilian factories to produce kamikaze attack drones.
However, the ministry said the PLA’s ability to launch a full-scale amphibious assault was “still insufficient”.
It said this would require simultaneous landings at multiple locations while maintaining air and sea superiority, as well as delivering reinforcements and supplies.

Chieh Chung, a research fellow at the Association of Strategic Foresight, a Taipei-based think tank, said this year’s defence ministry report devoted considerably more attention than last year’s to the PLA’s focus on joint amphibious landings.
While agreeing with the assessment of the mainland’s ability to carry out such operations, Chieh said the report showed that Beijing was accelerating preparations for a potential military campaign against Taiwan.
He also said the Han Kuang exercises had provided a “rather comprehensive” test of a range of multi-domain denial measures to counter the blockade, adding that this approach was “moving in the right direction”.