Increased Incursions in Early 2025

Through early 2025, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sustained and in places intensified the military pressure built up around Taiwan during 2024. Activity took the familiar grey-zone forms: near-daily aircraft entries into Taiwan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ), crossings of the Taiwan Strait median line, and accompanying naval and coast guard deployments. The ADIZ is a self-declared monitoring area, not sovereign airspace, but Taipei tracks every reported sortie because the tempo erodes warning time and normalises a permanent military presence close to the island.

The 2024 baseline was already a record. According to figures attributed to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense and compiled by The Jamestown Foundation, PLA sorties crossing the Strait's median line rose from 953 in 2021 and 1,703 in 2023 to 3,070 in 2024, the highest since the median line was effectively abandoned by Beijing in 2020. Early 2025 continued that trajectory: Taiwan News reported roughly 610 ADIZ incursions in the first two months of 2025, with 480 PLA sorties around Taiwan in February alone (362 of them entering the ADIZ), up about 84 percent on February 2024.

The period also saw large, mostly unannounced operations. The Taipei Times, citing Reuters and Taiwan's defence ministry, reported that in December 2024 China massed around 90 navy and coast guard vessels across the first island chain, described by Taipei as the largest such deployment since the 1996 war games, an operation Beijing never publicly named or confirmed.

The early-2025 picture is a continuation, not a new crisis: openly attributable PLA activity at a tempo set in 2024, now treated as routine. Reported figures vary by source and counting method, so they should be read as indicative rather than exact, but the direction is consistent across Taiwanese and independent trackers. The intent is assessed as coercive normalisation, pressuring Taipei, degrading its warning time and rehearsing blockade-style operations, short of open conflict. The ADIZ is not sovereign airspace, and median-line crossings are not territorial violations, but both function as deliberate, escalatory signalling.