China’s military began two days of live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait on Thursday, a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Beijing against any attempts to disrupt trade flows through one of the world’s most critical waterways. The drills, announced by China’s Maritime Safety Administration for areas off Dongshan Island in Fujian province, came just hours after Rubio met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Manila.
The timing was pointed. Rubio had used a press event in the Philippine capital to publicly call out China’s coast guard deployments east of Taiwan, operations that Washington views as a slow-burn effort to normalize jurisdictional claims over waters Taipei and its partners consider international. The live-fire notice followed within a day, a signal analysts read as deliberate but carefully bounded.
Rubio Draws a Line on Freedom of Navigation
Rubio told reporters that the United States “obviously disagrees” with China’s coast guard patrols near Taiwan and believes they “run contrary to the spirit of what we’re trying to work out with them with regards to strategic stability.” He reiterated Washington’s long-standing position that it would never accept that “international waterways are somehow under the control of other countries,” and later posted on X: “No nation has the right to restrict the free flow of commerce and travel through international waterways, including in the Taiwan Strait.”
The secretary’s meeting with Wang was framed by both sides as groundwork for President Donald Trump’s planned visit to Beijing in September, a follow-up to the Xi Jinping summit in May that had briefly cooled years of escalating tension. Rubio was blunt that the gap remains wide. “Obviously there are areas of great differences — both sides will acknowledge that,” he said. “Our job is to sort of manage those so they never get out of control.”
Taipei’s Foreign Ministry condemned the exercises, accusing Beijing of “the Chinese government’s repeated provocations and undermining of regional security and stability,” and warned that the drills endanger civilian vessels and aircraft transiting the corridor. The de facto embassies of Britain, Germany and France in Taiwan had already jointly expressed concern over China’s “special maritime law enforcement operations” east of the island, saying in a June statement that the actions threatened regional stability and that they opposed “any unilateral change to the status quo, particularly by threat or use of force or coercion.”
A Calibrated Warning, Not a Rehearsal for War
Analysts noted that the latest notice came from a provincial maritime safety agency rather than the People’s Liberation Army, a detail that distinguishes it from the large-scale joint exercises that encircled Taiwan in December. Su Tzu-yun, a researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, described the maneuver as a measured signal rather than a prelude to confrontation. “China’s brief live-fire exercise should be understood as both a political signal from Beijing and an exercise in risk management,” he said. “This normally suggests a relatively limited exercise. Beijing apparently intended to send a warning without allowing the situation to escalate into a major military confrontation.”
The economic stakes underscore why both sides have an interest in keeping the channel open. According to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report published this month, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines collectively shipped $755 billion worth of goods through the Taiwan Strait in 2024, compared with $474 billion through the Malacca Strait. China itself is even more exposed: nearly $1.3 trillion of its trade transited the strait last year, accounting for 58 percent of seaborne imports and a third of total imports.
Beijing has been steadily expanding its footprint in the corridor. Since early June it has deployed coast guard cutters on patrols east of Taiwan, a posture analysts describe as an effort to normalize its claim to those waters. Chinese vessels have broadcast radio messages to passing merchant ships telling them to leave the area, according to Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration. The operations were launched in response to what Beijing called unilateral moves by Japan and the Philippines to begin talks on maritime boundary delimitation, which China said infringed on its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights.
For now, the exercise appears designed to register displeasure without rupturing the fragile diplomatic channel that Rubio and Wang spent the week trying to keep open. Whether that channel holds will depend less on the drills themselves than on whether the coast guard presence east of Taiwan becomes a permanent fixture, and whether Washington’s rhetorical lines harden into concrete countermeasures. The September summit in Beijing now looms as the next test of whether the two governments can manage their differences without losing control of the strait.
The immediate test will be whether military signaling gives way to a workable channel for crisis communication. Until that happens, every exercise, warning and patrol will carry consequences far beyond the water where it occurs. Taiwan will watch for additional patrols, new exclusion notices and changes in air activity, while regional governments will weigh calls for restraint against the need to keep commercial routes open. Those decisions will determine whether the exercise fades as a signal or becomes another fixture of the strait’s security crisis. The next days will show whether the latest warning remains a controlled demonstration or becomes part of a longer cycle of pressure, patrols and counter-patrols.