By JIANLI YANG Dec 31, 2025
China’s latest action looks less like an exercise and more like a deliberate attempt to erase the line between drills and war.
On December 29, 2025, the Eastern Theater Command of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) abruptly launched a large-scale military operation around Taiwan. The operation, code-named “Justice Mission 2025,” was the seventh such action since 2022. But this provocation crossed red lines that earlier drills had deliberately avoided.
For the first time, Chinese maneuvers extended inside Taiwan’s twelve-nautical-mile territorial waters, with the closest activity reportedly less than five nautical miles from the main island. Disturbingly, the operation involved live fire. The drills caused tangible economic and social disruption: Taiwan’s civil aviation authorities were forced to issue multiple emergency flight advisories rerouting civilian aircraft, commercial shipping companies adjusted their schedules, and insurers raised risk alerts for vessels operating nearby.
Beijing framed the operation as a response to Washington’s recent approval of an approximately $11 billion arms package for Taiwan and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November statement that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency,” which echoed long-standing Japanese security assessments linking Taiwan’s fate to Japan’s own defense posture. Official statements from the Chinese government described the drills as a warning to “Taiwan independence forces” and “foreign interference.” Yet judged by scale, proximity, intensity, and real-world impact, “Justice Mission 2025” cannot be accurately understood as a conventional military exercise — or as a typical, one-off political response to Taipei, Washington, or Tokyo.
What makes this operation fundamentally different is not only how close the PLA moved, but how it moved. Past exercises were announced in advance and followed a predictable pattern, with clearly delineated zones, timelines, and preparation phases. We saw this during the large-scale drills that followed then–Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, when China publicly released exclusion zones and maritime notices days ahead of time… [Continue Reading]
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/12/beijing-weaponizes-strategic-ambiguity-on-taiwan/