Taiwan’s armed forces began a five-day “Immediate Combat Readiness Exercise” on Monday, the defence ministry announced, designed to prepare units for a rapid response should China’s routine military operations around the island suddenly escalate into an attack. The drills, held on real terrain with live troops and equipment, aim to improve the transition from peacetime to wartime deployment and harden joint-operations command. Taipei has calibrated its training scenarios to include the contingency of a Chinese exercise shifting from pressure to assault, a concern cited by the ministry.

On the same day, Taiwan’s defence ministry reported that 19 Chinese military aircraft, including J-16 fighters and Y-20 refuelling planes, entered the island’s southwestern airspace and the Western Pacific for “long-distance training over open seas.” Separately, China’s state broadcaster aired the first public footage of a Dongfeng-17 hypersonic missile being fired from a launcher in the Gobi Desert, a display of force that analysts in the region interpreted as a signal to Taipei and Washington about the People’s Liberation Army’s advancing capabilities ahead of the Rocket Force’s 60th anniversary on 1 July.

Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its territory and rejects the island’s government, routinely sends military aircraft near the island in what Taiwan and its allies view as coercion. In parallel with the military messaging, mainland authorities activated a level-four national emergency response across several provinces, including Anhui, Hubei and Guizhou, warning of potentially severe geological disasters caused by heavy rains forecast for the south. The emergency management ministry urged local officials to closely monitor weather and flood risks.

Taiwan’s drill will run until Friday, followed by the annual Han Kuang exercises in August, the island’s largest combined‑arms war games, which this year will incorporate lessons from recent tests of US‑supplied HIMARS rocket artillery. Cross‑strait tensions remain elevated amid the absence of formal communication channels; the Chinese defence ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the latest air activity. While Taiwan’s exercises rehearse a narrow window of escalation, Beijing is simultaneously juggling domestic crisis response and strategic messaging, a dual focus that underscores the competing demands on its security apparatus.