A sharp drop in the number of Chinese military flights detected around Taiwan has sparked new questions about what, if anything, Beijing is signaling ahead of major diplomatic and political events, according to Taiwan’s daily monitoring reports and commentary from former U.S. defense officials and analysts.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry issues daily updates on Chinese air force and naval activity around the island. In the period covered by this week’s reporting, Taiwan said many of those daily updates did not include the usual map with flight paths because no flights were detected.
The falloff began earlier, but Taiwan reported that no Chinese military planes were detected in its Air Defense Identification Zone for a week from Feb. 27 to March 5. After two aircraft were detected on March 6, the next four days included no detections in the zone.
Taiwan said flights resumed in small numbers over the last two days of the most recent reporting window—three on Wednesday and two on Thursday. That brought the total for the past two weeks to seven flights, compared with 92 flights during the same period last year.
Analysts said the timing of the decline may have coincided with political calendar events. The reporting said the sharpest drop occurred around the annual meeting of China’s legislature, when such flights had previously fallen during major events and public holidays, though one Taipei-based analyst said the magnitude this year was greater than in past declines.
Former U.S. defense official Drew Thompson, now a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said uncertainty about China’s intentions is itself dangerous. “There are so many theories and the lack of understanding of China’s intentions is what’s disconcerting,” Thompson said. “You fill the void with uncertainty, and uncertainty increases risk.”
The analysis also considered U.S.-China diplomacy. The reporting said the flight decline came roughly two weeks before a planned visit to China by U.S. President Donald Trump, a trip the White House has said would run from March 31 to April 2. Thompson said the Taiwan issue is not what matters most to the president, adding, “Trump sees China as an economic negotiation, not as a security challenge.”
Another explanation offered by K. Tristan Tang, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, was that the decline could reflect a shift to a new phase of military training and modernization. Tang said the military appeared to be exploring a new model for joint training among its air force and navy and possibly its ground forces, and that such exploratory activity would likely be conducted away from Taiwan to avoid monitoring by other countries, which could help explain fewer planes in the zone.
Taiwan said it was not changing its posture based on the reduced flight activity. Defense Minister Wellington Koo said China’s navy has remained active in nearby waters even as the military flights around the island fell. “As I have said before, we cannot rely solely on a single symptom like the absence of PLA aircraft to make a judgment,” Koo told journalists, using the acronym for the Chinese military’s official name. He added that Taiwan would continue to closely monitor the PLA’s movements.