On September 29 the China Coast Guard announced that a task group led by the cutter Zhujiajian had carried out “routine law-enforcement patrols” in the waters east of Taiwan. The announcement added a detail that matters more than the patrol itself. The group, Beijing said, had been “strengthening control” over those waters since the start of September.

Taiwan’s coast guard had been watching. Its cutter Lanyu shadowed two Chinese ships, the Zhujiajian (hull 2503) and the Chongming (1401), and placed them roughly 97 nautical miles northeast of Green Island and 146 nautical miles east of Lanyu. Far from the Strait. Far from Fujian. On the Pacific side of the island, where Taiwan’s east-coast ports and air bases face open water.

President Lai Ching-te speaks in front of the Presidential Office in Taipei on Saturday, October 10, for Taiwan’s National Day. It’s his third as president. The first one, in 2024, was followed four days later by Joint Sword-2024B, a named PLA exercise around the whole island.

Taipei is braced for something similar. The question worth asking is what form it takes, because the evidence from 2026 points somewhere other than a repeat of 2024.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration has detained the Chinese-crewed cargo vessel Hong Tai 58, a Togolese-flagged ship with Chinese ownership, on suspicion of deliberately severing the Taiwan-Penghu No. 3 (TP3) submarine cable — a critical communications link between Taiwan’s main island and the outlying Penghu archipelago. The incident, which occurred in the pre-dawn hours of a February morning, produced the first successful prosecution of its kind under Taiwan’s Telecommunications Management Act. The captain, a Chinese national identified as Wang, received a three-year prison sentence. Both the initial trial and appeal upheld the conviction.

The Senkaku Islands — known as the Diaoyu Islands in China — are eight uninhabited islands and rocks administered by Japan in the East China Sea, approximately 170 kilometers northeast of Taiwan and 330 kilometers west of Okinawa. Japan claims sovereignty. China claims sovereignty. Taiwan also claims sovereignty, though Taiwanese governments have generally handled the claim with less assertiveness than Beijing. The islands have no permanent population and no inherent economic value beyond the fisheries and potential hydrocarbon resources in the surrounding waters. Their strategic value lies entirely in their position: they sit at the junction of Japan’s Ryukyu chain and Taiwan’s northern approaches, and whoever controls them controls observation and potentially military positions that are relevant to both the East China Sea competition and the Taiwan Strait contingency.