China’s recent pattern of live-fire exercises around Taiwan is less an episodic show of force and more a rehearsal in operational art—one that privileges interdiction, area denial, and economic strangulation over a simple climb to all-out invasion. Beijing’s drills have repeatedly tested the seams that connect Taiwan to the global system: sea lanes, air routes, energy imports, and the gray-zone authorities that can be mobilized to make those seams brittle.
The August 2022 exercises remain the clearest blueprint. For several days the People’s Liberation Army and affiliated agencies declared multiple sea and air exclusion zones that encircled much of Taiwan, fired ballistic missiles into nearby waters, and generated disruptions to shipping and aviation. Taipei and many external observers described the pattern as tantamount to a blockade in practice because routine commercial movement and civil aviation were seriously impeded. The imagery and operational choices from that episode now appear incorporated into a learning cycle inside the PLA and related Chinese maritime instruments.
U.S. military assessments and public statements by senior U.S. officers indicate that these are not one-off demonstrations. In May 2024 a senior U.S. commander reported that Chinese forces had practiced core elements of forcible entry and counterintervention scenarios during 2023, including maneuvers consistent with attempting an aerial or maritime blockade and denying allied intervention. That is consequential because it signals an ongoing institutional emphasis on joint, multi-domain campaigns that seek to isolate Taiwan while controlling escalation.
Independent analysts and think tanks have been explicit about the calculus behind a blockade. For Beijing a blockade or quarantine offers a coercive tool that can achieve strategic aims at lower direct military cost and political risk than an amphibious invasion. It leverages China’s relative advantages: a large navy and coast guard, shorter operational lines, massed missile and air assets, and legal instruments that can be marshaled to cloak coercive acts with a veneer of legitimacy. These assessments were prominent after the cross-strait escalations tied to high-profile Taiwanese transits and visits in 2023, and they shaped planning assumptions among outside observers about likely PRC options short of full-scale war.
Operationally, what does a blockade rehearsal look like on the water and in the air? Public drills have combined a few clear elements: declaration of exclusion or warning zones that overlap important commercial corridors; concentrated sorties and naval groupings in choke points; missile and rocket live-fire into nearby littoral waters to demonstrate strike ranges and target sets; and the invocation of law enforcement or coast guard missions to harass, board, or divert civilian traffic under the rubric of fisheries enforcement or anti-smuggling. That mix is designed to impose friction on peacetime commerce, to force recalculation by foreign flag states and carriers, and to test the political will of potential external responders.
The strategic logic can be summarized simply: if Beijing can make it costly, risky, and unpredictable to keep supplies flowing to Taiwan, it can generate bargaining space short of occupying territory. Practically that means crippling energy imports, slowing inbound shipments of critical manufacturing inputs, and constraining ports. The economic leverage is acute because Taiwan imports most of its fossil fuels and many raw materials. That vulnerability makes a blockade an attractive element in a coercion playbook even when invasion remains distant or too risky. Analytic work and expert surveys conducted across 2022 and 2023 repeatedly concluded that quarantine or blockade options rank higher as feasible than a successful near-term amphibious seizure.
What does this imply for Taiwan’s defense posture and allied strategy? First, deterrence must be broadened beyond ships and jets. A credible denial of a blockade requires resilient civil logistics, distributed fuel and port options, hardened energy and communications infrastructure, and preplanned mechanisms to keep merchant traffic moving under escort. Second, signaling and legal preparedness matter. Allies need rapid protocols for maritime escorts, insurance and indemnity guarantees for civilian shipping, and agreed thresholds for stepped responses to coercive exclusion zones. Third, investments in time-sensitive resiliency—bunkered fuel, duplicative supply routes, and expeditionary logistics—are strategic force multipliers in a blockade scenario. Without them, kinetic superiority at sea will map directly into economic paralysis ashore.
Finally, policymakers must recognize the doctrine-game dynamic. Live-fire drills serve both to train forces and to shape narratives at home and abroad. Beijing’s objective is not only to test weapons and tactics but also to normalize the notion that restricting access is a legitimate instrument of policy. That normalization reduces the threshold for future coercion because it shifts the debate from whether to respond to how and when. The antidote is political and strategic: build durable multilateral mechanisms that make blockades costly, legally indefensible, and operationally difficult to sustain. That means maritime coordination, legal frameworks that safeguard freedom of navigation, targeted economic countermeasures, and persistent peacetime preparedness that prioritizes commercial continuity as a security imperative.
Live-fire drills around Taiwan are therefore more than theatre. They are deliberate learning opportunities for a coercion-first strategy that privileges blockade and quarantine as escalation options. Understanding that reality demands a long-term, integrated response across defense, diplomacy, industry, and civil infrastructure—because the first battle in a blockade campaign will be fought in ports, pipelines, and bank ledgers as much as on the deck of a warship.