The 2025 year for Taiwan’s resilience and defence
Maëlle Lefèvre, researcher at Asia Centre, publishes a new analysis on Taiwan, concerning its 2025 year. Read “The 2025 year for Taiwan’s resilience and defence: A new threshold crossed in terms of external and domestic pressure” via the PDF button above.
The 2025 year ended with the two-days military drill of the PLA around Taiwan, baptized “Justice Mission 2025”, as well as with the traditional New Year’s Eve message from Xi Jinping, stating that “the reunification […] was unstoppable”. It showed to what extent the status quo within the Strait is further eroded by Chinese military coercion, despite the unpredictability of the Trump administration reaction that could have deterred China to adopt such an aggressive posture before the organization of the presidential meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, which is supposed to take place in the first semester of 2026.
In that respect, 2025 was a continuation of the 2024[1] year which showed an acceleration of the strangulation strategy of China towards Taiwan. The latter saw the organization of no less than three important military manoeuvres, to be added to hybrid coercion – economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, disinformation, cyberattacks[2], lawfare[3], e.g. – and grey zone activities – damage on submarine cables, intrusion in restricted waters around peripheric islands, e.g. Besides, 2025 saw an increasing polarization between the government’s political party and the opposition and showed again to what extent the cohabitation established since the 2024 presidential and legislative elections keeps being detrimental to Taiwanese democracy’s resilience instead of reinforcing it.
[1] See Maëlle Lefèvre, “The resilience of the Taiwanese democracy challenged from the outside and the inside: A look back at William Lai term’s beginning during the 2024 year”, Asia Centre, January 6, 2025. https://asiacentre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ML_twnresilience.pdf
[2] In the beginning of January, a report published by Taiwanese National Security Bureau noted a 6% increase in average daily intrusion attempts against critical infrastructures compared to 2024 (an average of 2.63 million intrusion attempts per day). Energy infrastructures have been particularly affected, as well as hospitals.
[3] For instance, at the end of January 2024, China unilaterally changed the flight path (6 nautical miles to the East) of the M503 that can be seen as a further effort to “normalize” China’s air presence over the disputed waters, followed by the unilateral activation, on April 18, of air routes W122 and W123 for commercial purposes, further encroaching on the flight space around the island, and, in this case, the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen and Mazu, near which the recently activated routes pass. On July 2025, China announced the activation of the air route W121, illustrating once again Chinese efforts to deny Taiwan’s Flight Information Region (FIR) and to increase the pressure on Taiwanese air defense.