China's Gray-Zone Pressure on Taiwan, Explained: Drills, Incursions and Coercion

China's gray-zone pressure on Taiwan is one of the longest-running coercion campaigns in the world — and one of the least understood. It has no declared war, no invasion fleet on the horizon, and no single dramatic moment. Instead, Beijing applies a steady accumulation of military, economic, cyber and psychological pressure designed to exhaust Taiwan's defenses, erode public confidence, and shrink the island's international space, all while staying below the threshold of open war.

The pressure has been intensifying. In December 2025, China staged its largest-ever war games around the island, "Justice Mission 2025," firing dozens of rockets toward Taiwan and deploying large numbers of warships and aircraft in what Taiwan's security establishment described as a campaign of political coercion. (For the geography that makes the strait so volatile, see our companion piece, [why the Taiwan Strait matters](/articles/2026-09-27-why-the-taiwan-strait-matters).)

Key takeaways

• Gray-zone warfare means exhausting an enemy without open combat. Reuters defines it as "using irregular tactics to exhaust a foe without actually resorting to open combat" — and China has applied it against Taiwan for years.
• The toolkit is broad: live-fire blockade drills, daily PLA air and naval incursions, coast guard patrols, cyberattacks, disinformation, economic coercion — and even fleets of sand dredgers harassing Taiwan's outlying islands.
• "Justice Mission 2025" was the campaign's sharp end. Taiwan's National Security Bureau assessed the December 2025 drills — China's most extensive by coverage area — as politically motivated coercion aimed at undercutting international support for the island.
• The goal is normalization. Taiwanese officials and analysts say Beijing wants this pressure to feel so routine that the world stops reacting to it.

Contents

• What "gray-zone pressure" means
• The gray-zone pressure toolkit
• Justice Mission 2025: rehearsing a blockade
• Why it works — and why it might not

What "gray-zone pressure" means

"Gray zone" is not Beijing's term — it is the label analysts and journalists use for coercive actions that sit between diplomacy and war. The defining feature, as Reuters put it in its investigation of China's campaign against Taiwan, is "using irregular tactics to exhaust a foe without actually resorting to open combat."

The logic is attritional: every PLA jet that crosses the median line forces Taiwan to scramble its own aircraft — burning fuel, airframe hours and pilot readiness. Taiwanese military officials and Western analysts told Reuters the tactics are meant to "drain the resources and erode the will of the island's armed forces — and make such harassment so routine that the world grows inured to it."

Beijing, for its part, rejects the framing. China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has not ruled out the use of force to bring it under Chinese control. Taipei strongly objects to those sovereignty claims and says only Taiwan's people can decide their future.

The gray-zone pressure toolkit

The campaign operates across several domains at once:

Military incursions. The most visible layer is the near-daily dispatch of PLA warplanes and naval vessels toward the island. These forays have grown bolder, crossing the median line — the unofficial buffer that long separated the two sides — and entering Taiwan's air defense identification zone. Taiwan scrambles military aircraft on an almost daily basis to head off the threat, Reuters reported, placing what it called "an onerous burden on its air force."

Maritime harassment. China has used ostensibly civilian fleets as instruments of pressure. The most unusual: sand dredgers. Since mid-2020, Chinese dredging ships have swarmed the waters around the Taiwan-run Matsu Islands — just 9 kilometers from the Chinese coast at the closest point — scooping up seabed sand for construction projects in China. Taiwan's coast guard says it expelled nearly 4,000 such vessels from waters under its control in a single year, a 560% jump over 2019. The dredging also damaged undersea communication cables on five occasions, disrupting mobile and internet service for the 13,300 Matsu residents, Taiwanese officials told Reuters.

"The dredging is a 'gray-zone strategy with Chinese characteristics,' said Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research. 'You dredge for sand on the one hand, but if you can also put pressure on Taiwan, then that's great, too.'"

Cyber and information warfare. Taiwan's National Security Bureau reported that during the "Justice Mission 2025" drills, the island's government received more than two million cyberattacks on the first two days alone, naming the PLA-linked hacking groups APT24 and BlackTech among the most active. The same report said China used state media, AI-generated content and online "troll armies" — some 19,000 "controversial messages" pushed by 799 accounts in five days — to amplify its narratives, cast doubt on Taiwan's military capabilities, and undermine trust in President Lai Ching-te and the United States.

Economic and diplomatic coercion. The NSB report said China has been ramping up a "hybrid" campaign to pressure Taiwan militarily and economically, drawing resistance from democratic partners in the U.S. and Europe.

Justice Mission 2025: rehearsing a blockade

In late December 2025, the campaign crossed into something harder to call "gray." In exercises dubbed "Justice Mission 2025," China fired dozens of rockets toward Taiwan and deployed large numbers of warships and aircraft near the island, forcing the cancellation of dozens of domestic flights and drawing concern from regional allies and Western governments.

Taiwan's National Security Bureau, in a report to parliament reviewed by Reuters, said the drills carried "clear political intent: to push back in the international arena against democratic partners' support for Taiwan" — and were also meant to "redirect public anger over economic setbacks and social disorder at home into nationalist sentiment framed as 'resisting external interference.'"

The drills were China's most extensive war games to date by coverage area, and the first in which Beijing framed the exercises as aimed at deterring outside intervention — a signal to Washington and Tokyo as much as to Taipei.

Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on the report, but said at a regular press briefing that recent drills were intended to "staunchly defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Why it works — and why it might not

The campaign's strength is its ambiguity: no single incident amounts to an act of war, so each is hard to answer proportionately — which one Taiwanese security official called "part of their psychological warfare against Taiwan."

But the campaign has limits, and they are becoming visible:

Taiwan is adapting. Taipei has hardened its coast guard, increased penalties for illegal dredging, and its Mainland Affairs Council has publicly labeled the campaign "harassment" aimed at pressuring the island.

International support is growing, not shrinking. The NSB's own assessment was that the Justice Mission drills were designed to push back against rising democratic support for Taiwan — an admission that the support exists and worries Beijing.

Normalization cuts both ways. If constant pressure becomes routine, it also becomes legible: Taiwan's military, its public, and its partners increasingly read each new drill as part of a known pattern rather than a bolt from the blue.

What to watch: whether the post–Justice Mission tempo settles back into daily attrition or establishes a new, higher baseline — and whether future drills become direct tests of American and Japanese resolve.