Since the start of the decade, China has sharply accelerated its efforts to close in on Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own territory and is seeking to bring under its control. It wields a vast tool kit to pressure the island democracy—one that has expanded as China has cemented its position as a global power.

In the diplomatic realm, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is using his country’s clout to isolate Taiwan, taking aim at a crucial lifeline: American support. At the same time, Chinese forces constantly fly, sail, probe and patrol close to Taiwan, signaling to the island’s 23 million people that Beijing’s hard-power buildup makes their resistance to a takeover futile.

A key player in this pressure campaign is China’s navy, a well-equipped force numerically larger than any other in the world.

Each escalation followed a political development Beijing didn’t like, such as the results of Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election and a high-profile American visit to Taipei in 2022, the officials said. Today, five or six Chinese warships surround Taiwan at almost all times, with the count frequently higher as other naval ships make intermittent visits.

“It represents a tightening of the noose,” said Michael Dahm, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

As the numbers have grown, what used to be mainly frigates has become a mix of frigates and larger destroyers, reflecting Beijing’s more aggressive posture toward Taiwan and the expansion of its navy’s fleet. China has rapidly built destroyers and now has 48 of them.

.The operations are emblematic of how, in a handful of years, Chinese forces have changed the everyday reality in the waters and airspace around Taiwan. 

On most days, military aircraft take off from China and cross the “median line” that divides the Taiwan Strait, probing Taiwan’s defenses. China’s coast guard pushes into waters around smaller Taiwanese islands. Since the summer of 2022, Beijing has launched a string of military drills with names such as Justice Mission and Strait Thunder, surrounding Taiwan with warships, jet fighters, bombers, drones and more.

Chinese authorities didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Bumping the boundary:China’s round-the-clock naval patrols are more than just tools for political messaging. They offer its forces daily opportunities to gather data and experience in waters where they might one day fight. If Beijing launched an invasion across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese navy would play a pivotal role—a contingency for which it is training.

In peacetime today, each of the half-dozen Chinese warships around Taiwan stays out for about two weeks at a time, the security officials said. When one leaves, it is replaced. Rather than draw from a small pool of ships, China’s navy dispatches a variety of different ships for the rotations, giving more crews a chance to operate and gain confidence in the area, they said.

The ships tend to stay outside the 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone Taipei claims, but not always. They frequently break into so-called joint combat readiness patrols—periods of heightened activity when they push inward by a few miles in a choreographed tactic some security officials call “bumping the boundary.”

Taiwan, which recorded 40 such patrols last year and 15 so far this year, responds by sending its warships and coast-guard vessels to shadow the Chinese ships until they leave the 24-nautical-mile boundary. This back-and-forth has been growing in duration, now often lasting up to 48 hours, the officials said.

The maneuvers put a heavy burden on Taiwan’s navy, which is far smaller than China’s and is battling manpower shortages. Taiwanese warships must be ready at all times to respond, delaying their regular maintenance and cutting into rest periods for crew, according to Taiwanese officials.

.China, meanwhile, is collecting troves of information on Taiwanese forces: how they move, operate and communicate, and how they respond to Chinese activities. “It will be harder to surprise the Chinese navy in the future,” Dahm said, adding: “For Taiwan it means fewer options, less places to hide, less possibility for deception.”

Operating to Taiwan’s east allows China to study the waters there, potentially uncovering hiding spots for enemy submarines, Dahm said. In a conflict, that would also have implications for U.S. forces if they joined the defense of Taiwan. It would be harder for American subs to sneak up on Chinese navy ships arrayed off Taiwan’s eastern seaboard.

On that side, the Chinese navy ships are also often stationed off key Taiwanese military bases at Hualien and Taitung, the security officials said. While that may be an intimidation tactic, it also serves a clear operational rationale: collecting data and building a better picture of the potential battlefield, said Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.Chinese destroyers sailing past those bases today could, in war, be tasked with striking and destroying them,

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Inflection point :Security officials say 2020 was an inflection point for China’s military activities around Taiwan. There are a few reasons they believe that happened. 

A year earlier, Xi had directed his country’s armed forces to have the capabilities in place by 2027 to take Taiwan by force if ordered to do so, moving up the timeline from 2035, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. 2027 wasn’t an invasion date but a readiness target that nonetheless meant China’s military needed to move faster. 

Then in 2020, Taiwan re-elected its president at the time, Tsai Ing-wen, who had cast herself as a firm defender of Taiwan’s democracy—a result seen as a rebuke to Beijing. That year, China increased its naval presence around Taiwan from one to three warships.

A string of events after that brought more ships: then-U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 trip to Taipei, another Taiwan election that went poorly for Beijing in 2024, and the deaths of two Chinese fishermen in an incident involving Taiwan’s coast guard that year.

Now, security officials are watching to see if the count of Chinese ships off Taiwan’s shores edges up again.

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