Six more Min Jiang-class fast minelayers are due from Lungteh Shipbuilding by the end of December, which takes the ROC Navy from four hulls to ten. Each boat carries between 32 and 64 Wan Hsiang mines and lays them from fixed tracks amidships and aft. Run the full fleet at two sorties apiece and Taiwan can put somewhere between 640 and 1,280 mines across the approaches to its harbours in a matter of days.

On May 6, 2026, Taiwan’s first indigenously developed submarine, the SS-711 Hai Kun (海鯤), successfully conducted its maiden torpedo launch test — the most consequential weapons milestone in the program’s history to date.

#Taiwan's first indigenous submarine #Haikun (SS-711), the #Narwhal, has successfully conducted the torpedo launch test. A big milestone. It'll soon be defending our waters.
💪💪💪 pic.twitter.com/ffRAfV7shs

— Joseph Wu (@josephwutw) May 7, 2026

State-owned shipbuilder CSBC Corp confirmed in a formal statement that the test verified the combat system’s full operational chain: detection and tracking, fire control, launch sequencing, and torpedo guidance. The Hai Kun — named after a mythological creature of unfathomable scale from the ancient text Zhuangzi — carries a Lockheed Martin combat system and is designed to deploy US-made Mark 48 heavyweight torpedoes. CSBC did not disclose the specific type of torpedo fired during the test.

China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, underwent sea trials beginning in 2023 and has been advancing toward operational status. It is the first Chinese carrier equipped with electromagnetic aircraft launch system catapults — the same technology used on the American Gerald R. Ford class — which allows it to launch heavier aircraft with greater frequency than the ski-jump launch systems on China’s first two carriers, the Liaoning and the Shandong. The Fujian represents a genuine capability advance that brings Chinese carrier aviation meaningfully closer to the operational model that American carriers have perfected over decades. It does not bring the PLAN to American carrier aviation parity, and its operational utility in a Taiwan contingency is less straightforward than its physical characteristics suggest.

Taiwan launched its first indigenously designed and built submarine in September 2023. The vessel — named Hai Kun, or Narwhal — represented the culmination of a program that was announced in 2016, funded against significant domestic political opposition, and executed despite the near-total unavailability of normal defense industrial cooperation channels. No major submarine-building nation would sell Taiwan a complete submarine. The United States, which provides most of Taiwan’s conventional weapons, does not export submarines to any partner. Taiwan built one anyway, with foreign assistance obtained through channels that required deliberate diplomatic ambiguity from the governments whose citizens and companies were involved.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy has added more ships to its fleet in the past twenty years than most countries have in their entire navies. By hull count, the PLAN is now the largest navy in the world, surpassing the United States Navy in number of surface combatants and submarines. The comparison requires qualification — American vessels are generally larger, more capable on a per-unit basis, and operated by more experienced crews in a navy with a longer tradition of sustained blue-water operations. But the qualification should not obscure the fundamental shift: China has built a navy capable of contesting American naval supremacy in the western Pacific, and it has done so on a timeline that surprised most Western defense analysts.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Monday, April 20, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry — marking the first passage of a carrier through the waterway since late last year.

The transit is a deliberate signal. The strait, roughly 180 kilometers wide at its narrowest, is one of the most politically loaded stretches of water in the world. Beijing claims it as internal waters; Washington and Taipei reject that framing and maintain freedom-of-navigation as a standing principle. Sending a carrier through it is not a routine patrol — it is a message, timed and calculated.