China’s live-fire workout routines round Taiwan this week are simulating the steps it’d take to seal off the island with a blockade, previewing the sort of coercive ways Chinese language leaders could make use of in a future conflict.
The four-day exercises, to protest the visit to Taipei earlier this week by Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi, began at midday on Thursday in six zones that effectively encircle Taiwan. A number of of the zones face the island’s greatest industrial ports and overlap with what Taipei claims as its territorial waters, coming inside 12 miles of its shoreline in what some navy analysts have in contrast with a brief blockade.
