The allusion is not to an eclipse of the sun but to an eclipse of the Chinese Communist Party’s usual antics in the Taiwan Strait. “The constant roar of PLA jets and the daily dance across the median line” stopped on Saturday, February 28, and the pause lasted for eight days. What happened?
Lei of Lei’s Real Talk surveys and dismisses some of the explanations that have been offered.
The planes were not grounded as a gesture of goodwill to “demonstrate that China is the stable and responsible superpower in an otherwise chaotic world,” which is what CCP propaganda organ Global Times suggested. They were not grounded because China’s air force needed a rest after the thousands of sorties of 2025. Nor did the planes run out of fuel. Nor was the silence “intended as leverage” to be used during Xi Jinping’s impending meeting with Donald Trump.
“On the surface, all of the above explanations sound reasonable to some extent, but there’s one problem. None of them explain the timing. If you want to create a peaceful backdrop for diplomacy, you don’t suddenly stop flying on a random Saturday afternoon. If you are conducting maintenance, you don’t ground all aircraft suddenly at the same time.”
What happened
Operation Harass Taiwan, which had been going on forever, stopped dead in the Taiwan Strait at almost exactly the same time that Operation Epic Fury against Iran commenced: 1:15 a.m. on February 28 in Washington DC, 9:45 a.m. in Tehran, 1:15 p.m. in Beijing.
“Historically, the PLA conducts its heaviest activity between 2 and 4 p.m. That’s when the largest formation typically appear on radar. But on February 28, that wave never came….
“It was not a routine pause. It was an instantaneous high-level reaction. The moment the U.S. launched a major strike in the Middle East, Beijing pulled back…. It was a sudden cautious retreat while Beijing tried to reassess whether the weapons it had spent decades building could actually survive a modern war.”
Others have also noticed that various Chinese military tech is not proving to be super-robust. Rakesh Krishnan Simha writes: “By systematically degrading Chinese-supplied air defences and missile technologies embedded within Iran’s arsenal, the strikes have exposed systemic vulnerabilities in Beijing’s military exports, undermining its strategic leverage in the Gulf and beyond.”
Anyi Kings writes: “In recent years, China has become the world’s third-largest arms exporter, promising high-tech military gear at a fraction of the cost of Western weapons. However, several real-world conflicts in 2025 and 2026—involving Pakistan, Venezuela, and Iran—have revealed that these ‘bargain’ weapons may not be the game-changers they were advertised to be.” There follows a laundry list of Chinese weapons that have reportedly failed on the battlefields of Pakistan, Venezuela, and Iran.
Arturo McFields Yescas generously concludes that “China has become the laughingstock of the international community. For years, its leaders showcased their powerful HQ-9B missiles as the best air defense system. But they were lying. In less than a year, their system has failed catastrophically in Pakistan, in Venezuela and now in Iran.”
Lei believes that because of widespread corruption among CCP officials—pocket-lining—“weapons that look impressive in brochures are actually built with the cheapest possible internal components.”
The Ides of March
She also suggests that the eight-day silence in the Taiwan Strait may have been a bid to affect the legislative battle over the military budget in Taipei. This is a budget supported by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party that the ROC’s opposition parties, the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party, want to drastically cut.
“And the message is very simple,” says Lei. “If there are no Chinese planes in the sky, why are we spending $40 billion—that’s U.S. dollars—on missiles, on defense systems?” Even after the eight-day pause ended, China was less active in the strait than usual.
“This is China’s United Front warfare in its most subtle form. In a way, the eight-day silence becomes the weapon. It fuels opposition arguments that the threat from Beijing is exaggerated…and it buys just enough time for the political debate to stall. Because there’s a critical deadline coming. The Defense Ministry of Taiwan has warned that the letters of offer and acceptance for major U.S. arms purchases are set to expire on March 15. If the budget fails to move forward before that date, the deals could collapse. Costs will rise and Taiwan’s defense modernization…will be delayed.”
Beijing, “a predator [that was] retreating into the shadows because something suddenly made it realize its claws might be weaker than it believed,” hopes to “win the battle inside the Legislative Yuan because at this moment they may not be confident that they could win the battle in the Taiwan Strait.”
Also see:
China Power: “Tracking China’s Increased Military Activities in the Indo-Pacific in 2025”
“The PLA conducted a record level of overall activity around Taiwan in 2025. According to data from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, PLA aircraft conducted 3,764 air incursions into Taiwan’s de facto air defense identification zone, an increase of 22.4 percent from 2024 when the PLA smashed previous records.”
