China’s military exercise last week to blockade Taiwan was mostly political posturing aimed at Washington, Taipei, as well as China’s domestic audiences, analysts said.
On April 1, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s Eastern Threaten Command said in announcements on the Chinese-language messaging app WeChat that it was holding joint exercises around Taiwan as a warning and deterrence against what it called “Taiwan Independence separatist forces.”
The two-days of war games came on the heels of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s visit to the Indo-Pacific, during which he assured allies of U.S. commitment to reestablishing effective deterrence in the region.
According to the PLA announcements, the exercises involved the PLA’s Navy, Air, Ground, and Rocket forces. Beijing did not formally name the April 1 drills. On April 2, the Eastern Theater Command gave a code name, Strait Thunder-2025A, for its long-range live-fire drills into the waters of the East China Sea.
Taiwan’s retired major general Yu Tsung-chi said the PLA’s publicized materials appeared to have been cobbled together at the last minute, suggesting that the drills were not pre-planned.
Shen Ming-Shih, research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) and former director of the institute’s division of national security research, said the long-range live-fire drills may have been held somewhere along China’s coastline because the PLA was unlikely to hold such unplanned tests on international waters without first designating a target area.
“The reference to the East China Sea may have been misleading,” he told The Epoch Times. Shen Ming-Shih added that it was “hard to tell” whether the footage shared by the PLA was new.
Military commentator Shen Zhou also said the CCP was working hard to push the narrative that its so-called long-range rocket artillery exercises were part of the blockade exercises.
“It’s possible that old videos were used for publicity. The images showed targets on land, not on the sea,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that the “so-called war game is still of a political nature.”
Reaction to US-Taiwan Policy
In materials accompanying its drill announcements, the PLA called Taiwan President Lai Ching-te a “parasite.” The regime’s Taiwan Affairs Office claimed [source] that Lai had been “stirring up anti-China sentiments” with his recent 17-point strategy to counter CCP infiltration and espionage activities in Taiwan.
INDSR research fellow Su Tzu-yun, director of the institute’s Division of Defense Strategy and Resources, said the CCP was likely reacting to several events; in particular, the U.S. Defense Department’s reported prioritization of Taiwan’s defense.
Speaking in Manila on March 28, Hegseth told reporters that the Trump administration would “truly prioritise and shift to this region of the world in a way that is unprecedented.”According to a Washington Post report the next day, the U.S. defense secretary had also signed internal guidance instructing senior defense officials to prioritize deterring a CCP seizure of Taiwan over risks in other parts of the world. The Epoch Times has not reviewed the document and has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.
Such reorientation would be “the transition from verbal commitment to action,” Su told The Epoch Times. He said the report was “the main reason that China was very unhappy and abruptly held the drills.”
Another purpose of the drills, Su said, was to divert attention from corruption within the PLA and the recent downfall of high ranking PLA officials.
Since CCP leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign across the regime, including in the PLA.
The campaign, which U.S. intelligence described as being more of a “targeting of political indiscipline and ideological impurity,” first targeted loyalists of former CCP leader Jiang Zemin. However, more recent purges targeted the Fujian clique, one of two groups considered to be Xi’s allies.
The purges have led to ongoing speculation about whether Xi’s power is being challenged by political rivals.
Since the end of the annual session of National People’s Congress on March 11, a number of high-ranking PLA officials have reportedly been arrested, including He Weidong, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, a CCP committee overseeing the armed forces; and Lin Xiangyang, commander of the Eastern Theater Command.
Yu said the arrests of “Xi’s staunchest supporters in the army” does indicate signs of Xi’s power being weakened. But the retired major general also cautioned against ruling out the possibility that the apparent purges are smoke and mirrors that coverup preparations for a real attack.Too Risky to Attack
“If a (PLA) landing failed, it would be a political catastrophe for Xi Jinping and the CCP. They would probably lose the legitimacy in ruling,” he said.
Su said the chance of a CCP attack on Taiwan is low unless the regime is sure it can secure a quick win, because a long-term blockade will likely be met with interventions, because “no country would tolerate” a blockade of one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.
Shen Ming-Shih said it’s unlikely the CCP will escalate its military drills around Taiwan, because none of the party’s recent drills were bigger than the one launched in 2022 following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan.
Tammy Bruce, spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the United States “supports peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and opposes unilateral changes to the status quo, including through force or coercion.”
Yu said leaders of democratic countries have learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that only swift and determined opposition can deter totalitarian regimes from miscalculation or over-optimism that third party countries won’t intervene in an invasion.
