With Jets and Ships, China is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan

China’s large-scale military exercises are encircling Taiwan and testing the island’s defenses. They also raise the risk of conflict, accidental or otherwise.

The Chinese warplanes, deployed in record numbers, crossed an informal boundary between China and Taiwan. Chinese Coast Guard boats joined naval ships in encircling Taiwan. Fighter jets took off from an aircraft carrier parked off the island’s east coast.

The large-scale military drills China held this week were aimed at demonstrating its potential to choke Taiwan’s access to food and fuel and block the skies and waters from which the United States and its allies would presumably approach in coming to the island’s defense.

The exercises showed how China was improving its coordination of complex operations involving a range of military, coast guard and rocket forces. They also raise the risk of a confrontation or accident that could draw in the United States and its Asian allies.

China’s tightening military squeeze on Taiwan is imposing a new normal — creating daily pressure that exhausts the island’s defense forces and increases the incentive for Taiwan to capitulate without a fight.

It was the second time in less than five months that China has conducted similar exercises in response to what it regarded as pro-separatist remarks by the island’s president, Lai Ching-te. By comparison, China held two such drills during the eight years Mr. Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, was in office.

“Beijing is normalizing the use of these large scale military and coast guard activities under the Lai administration,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They have made it clear that if they see things that they perceive as provocative from Taiwan that they will respond this way.”

Some analysts saw China’s drills as aimed in part as a response to military exercises by the United States and its allies in the region. On Wednesday, the United States and the Philippines began their annual war games. Troops from Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain and France are also participating. U.S. exercises with Japan are planned for later this month.

China kept up the drumbeat of pressure on Taipei on Wednesday with a tour by President Xi Jinping of Dongshan County, a coastal community in eastern Fujian Province that is close to Taiwan. On the same day, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, reiterated that Beijing would not renounce the use of force to take Taiwan, if necessary.

Should they become more frequent, China’s large-scale drills increase the risks in what was already one of the most contested areas in the world. An accident between Chinese and Taiwanese forces could plunge the two sides into a political crisis and an “escalation spiral” in which neither Beijing nor Taipei can pull out of, risking war, Mr. Hart said.

In any such conflict between China and Taiwan, the United States might come to Taiwan’s defense. That American support for Taipei remains one of the biggest drivers of tension with China. Beijing accuses Washington of promoting Taiwanese independence, and Washington accuses Beijing of sowing instability with provocative military drills.

The pressure campaign includes challenging Taiwan’s limits in the skies and the waters. Among the record 153 planes China flew toward the island, 111 crossed the so-called median line in the Taiwan Strait. Until several years ago, it was an informal boundary that they had rarely crossed. The coast guard also sent four boats into restricted waters near Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, close to mainland China.

China is still trying to teach its army, navy, air force and other military branches to coordinate better. That is a skill militaries like that of the United States have honed over decades of continuous war, whereas the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has not fought a battle since its brief conflict with Vietnam 45 years ago.

“China continues to press up against the contiguous zone so these activities are coming closer and closer to Taiwan shores,” said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We see them flying further from China’s coast. We see them operating on the east side of Taiwan as well, so you know we see the sophistication increasing.”

China is also not nearly as experienced as the United States wielding aircraft carriers. The inclusion of the Liaoning, China’s first carrier, allowed the ship to practice projecting its strength toward the Pacific Ocean where it is presumed U.S. and other forces, potentially from bases in Japan and Guam, would come from should the two sides go to war. China released video of fighter jets launching from its decks.

“It is equivalent to having an airport on the Pacific side,” said Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan who specializes in the People’s Liberation Army, of the Liaoning. “If the People’s Liberation Army today has the ability to attack from the east side, Taiwan’s strategy of using the east as a reserve base will need to be adjusted.”

Still, the most significant aspect of this week’s drills may be the inclusion of 18 coast guard vessels, the most in any such exercise. That indicated that China would lean heavily on maritime law enforcement to impose a quarantine around Taiwan, analysts said, leaving the military to focus on fighting.

A bigger role for the coast guard reinforces Beijing’s assertion that Taiwanese waters are actually Chinese, making any blockade or quarantine a domestic issue. And during a war, it is generally assumed an opposing navy would avoid firing on coast guard ships because it could play into a Chinese narrative that it is other militaries escalating tensions.

Beijing’s continued bid to intimidate Taiwan with its military has potential consequences for its other interests. The specter of Chinese forces surrounding Taiwan could scare off foreign investors at a time when China is trying woo them back to help stabilize its economy, which has been badly weakened by a property crisis.

The drills also risk making China a greater focus of the American presidential campaigns — something analysts said Beijing has been trying to avoid so that the next administration might not feel as much pressure to confront China.

“While China is thought to be cautious during this period, the drills send the message that Taiwan remains so sensitive, so important and crucial for the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Washington policy research group.

Indeed, a crucial audience for China’s drills is the one at home. In propaganda messages, the Chinese Coast Guard sought to cast its exercises as a paternalistic gesture of love toward its Taiwanese compatriots, captured in a graphic depicting Taiwan surrounded by a line of red arrows in the shape of a heart.

The gesture fell flat in Taiwan, where on social media and political talk shows, commentators poked fun at the illustration, which was accompanied by the message: “The patrol is in the shape of loving you.”

Many in Taiwan responded with a collective “ick.” Some compared the illustration to the mind-set of an abusive partner. Others said the graphic was “too disgusting” and called it “sexual harassment.”

Chris Buckley contributed reporting.