Taiwanese firefighter Kuo Fong-yu is among the first to arrive after the explosion. Beneath thick plumes of black smoke from the blast, simulating a guided missile strike by “enemy” forces on the port of Taipei, Kuo and his team race to find civilians trapped in the rubble of the bombed facility.
The exercise is part of Taiwan’s annual civil defence drills, held concurrently with its Han Kuang military exercises, all designed to prepare Taiwan for a possible Chinese invasion. Beginning on 22 July, Taiwan’s military has conducted live-fire, anti-landing exercises on its outlying islands; tanks have rumbled through city streets; and missile sirens have sent civilians to air-raid shelters. (The exercises, which were scheduled to run until 26 July, concluded a day earlier than planned due to Typhoon Gaemi.)
“The Port of Taipei is critical national infrastructure,” Kuo told me, shortly before the drill began. “We have to know how to protect it.” Capturing the port would likely be critical to sustaining a Chinese invasion; only 30 minutes separates it by car from the presidential office in Taipei.
The Han Kuang exercises and drills, which have been held for 40 years, underwent a major revision for 2024. Pre-scripted scenarios were scrapped while night-time exercises were added, and units were required to operate independently after their communication channels with central command were cut.
Chen Ming-chi, a former senior adviser to Taiwan’s National Security Council, said the crescendo of Chinese threats in recent years has largely driven the change, but that crucial lessons have also been learned by observing current conflicts, especially Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare strategy (in which an enemy’s military might is much greater than one’s own), society-wide resilience and reserve mobilisation. During a Chinese invasion, he said, “we cannot assume the command and control will be intact. We want to test the capability of every commander along the command line.”
Taiwan’s new defence minister, Wellington Koo – the first civilian to hold the office in over a decade, as a series of retired generals have held the position in the past – has been credited with pushing through the changes. “[Koo] wanted to make the exercise have a sense of realism,” said Chen, a former colleague of his. He added that “organisational inertia” had inhibited that realism in the past, but Koo’s arrival helped launch drills that went off-script, “something that we should have done long before”.
While observers say the drills this year are more reflective of real-war scenarios, at the civil defence drills there is still a sense of the theatrical. Inside one of the port’s hangars, actors playing trapped citizens, painted with disturbingly realistic trauma wounds, posed for a group photo. “One, two, three… Does it hurt?” the photographer asked. “Yes!” the group responded, groans added for dramatic effect.
Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te, observing the drills from a nearby platform and, visibly enjoying the participants’ enthusiasm, refrained from discussing the drills in depth. “In the face of a changing geopolitical landscape, the government must be prepared,” he simply told me.
Three days after Lai’s inauguration in May, China launched large-scale war games around Taiwan, the third of the kind since Beijing held unprecedented exercises following the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.
In June, Beijing alarmed people in Taiwan when it warned that extreme cases of “diehard” Taiwanese separatism, as carried out by those deemed the “ringleaders” of independence, could be punishable by death. In response, Taiwan raised its travel alert level for China, warning citizens against all but essential travel to the country. On 24 July, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, the branch of the Chinese government that manages relations with Taiwan, said that Taiwanese employees working at Chinese companies should be at ease – “as long as they do not engage in criminal acts”.
Similarly ominous language features in the 17-minute preview of Zero Day, a forthcoming Taiwanese TV drama about a fictional Chinese invasion, with eerie echoes of the drills that have just taken place. In a trailer for the series released this week, Beijing, under the pretext of search and rescue, imposes a blockade on Taiwan after a Chinese aircraft vanishes near the island. A run on the banks ensues, foreign nationals are evacuated, and desperate fights for supplies break out at shops. (At the real-life port of Taipei, one exercise focused on how to disperse civilians clamouring for goods while anti-war protesters demonstrated nearby. Police swooped in to disperse the demonstrators as civil defence units set up stalls to distribute supplies.)
In the preview for Zero Day, as US forces prepare foreign conflict, a national address by Taiwan’s president is hacked, presumably using AI, altering his speech into a declaration of war on China. Televisions across Taiwan suddenly cut to a Chinese news anchor. With a menacing smile, she reads: “The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] promises that all Taiwanese compatriots will be fully protected.” The show was partly funded by Taiwan’s ministry of culture and Robert Tsao, the billionaire founder of the semiconductor firm United Microelectronics Corporation. It is scheduled to be broadcast next year.
Before that comes the US election. For Taiwan, the prospect of a Donald Trump win and a potential erosion of Washington’s security commitments to Taipei, is alarming. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Trump said: “Taiwan should pay us for defence… You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”
But uncertainty over the US election is just one reflection of a deeper challenge that Taiwan has long faced: how to balance between preparing its citizens for the real threat of conflict, while not simultaneously inciting panic.
Here, Chen, who recently stepped down as the CEO of Taiwan’s Institute of National Defence and Security Research, a think tank, says the “all out defence” approach on display at the port of Taipei – incorporating military units, civil defence groups and disaster relief teams – is critical. He likened civilians’ participation in exercises to a vaccine against capitulation.
“Over-preparation is not a threat,” he said. “The more prepared you are, whether it’s your immune system or your national defence capability, the better off you are.”
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