Maybe it takes an expert to tell when the gray of the gray zone has turned black. But if I were a Taiwanese citizen working for the military of the Republic of China and my country were being subjected to constant and increasing almost-completed attacks by the People’s Republic of China—to not very faint feints designed to erode our ability to respond to a full invasion and to properly alert the public during the earliest stages of such an invasion—it sure would feel like war.
The ROC is reducing the threshold for conducting an air raid warning and for scrambling jets because the PRC incursions have become too many to deal with as they should be dealt with.
According to the February 7, 2025 issue of China-Taiwan Weekly Update:
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) flew aircraft into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) 255 times in January 2025. The PRC has normalized over 200 ADIZ incursions per month since President Lai’s inauguration in May 2024 in order to degrade Taiwan’s threat awareness and raise the threshold for its threat response. PLA incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ have exceeded 200 per month every month since May 2024 but only did so four times prior to 2024. The volume of ADIZ incursions in January was the second lowest since May but was still significantly higher than the pre-2024 average. ADIZ incursion numbers do not include PLA activity around Taiwan’s outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu, which are west of the median line of the Taiwan Strait.
This “new normal” volume of ADIZ incursions raises the threshold of coercive activity that will trigger a Taiwanese response, making it more difficult for Taiwan to detect and respond to a real threat in time. Taiwan must put personnel on standby to respond to each ADIZ incursion if necessary, which strains resources and exhausts the personnel. Taiwan does not typically scramble its own aircraft to respond to such incursions, however, because the incursions are so frequent. Taiwanese media revealed in late 2024 that the Republic of China (ROC) Ministry of National Defense (MND) quietly shortened the warning distance for air raid warnings from 70 to 24 nautical miles at the end of 2022 because the increased volume of PLA activity would have required near-daily air raid alerts under the previous threshold. The new threshold would give residents of some Taiwanese regions just three minutes to seek shelter in a real air raid, however.
The siren can’t be going all the time. The ROC government does not want to repeatedly be in the position of the boy who cried “Wolf!” But if the boy is crying “Wolf!” not to get attention but because wolves are continually circling the farm…it’s a problem.
An unremitting, ever-intensifying almost-war cannot remain almost forever. And if it does cross into the kind of engagement that would indisputably be war, I don’t think we could say that the long lead-up involving all sorts of invasive military maneuvers and pressures were not a part of the invasion that follows. The Republic of China is besieged right now.
