Three hundred seventy Taiwanese officials spent two days deciding how to keep a mountain county running while, in the exercise’s telling, Chinese warships blockaded the coast, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake killed a dozen people, hijacked televisions began broadcasting Beijing’s propaganda, and banks faced a run. Then came the invasion.
The drill unfolded this week in Nantou, Taiwan’s only landlocked county, part of President Lai Ching-te’s push to harden the island’s defenses against Chinese pressure. Reuters was granted rare access to the closed-door exercise, the first test of whether officials in the mountainous county, working alongside central government and military agencies, could keep basic services running under sustained attack.
“Our adversary is right on our doorstep, just across the Taiwan Strait. That is very close.”
Chi Lien-cheng, minister without portfolio overseeing the drill
“If you don’t defend your own country, who else will defend you? I think people are beginning to understand that,” Chi added, acknowledging the exercise exposed real shortcomings and that resources could fall short in an actual disaster. “But that’s all right. We are here to see how they carry out the exercise, whether they have the will to absorb these concepts and put them into practice.”
China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. Beijing’s military pressure on the self-governed island has climbed steadily this year. Taiwan’s government insists only the island’s people can decide their own future. That standoff is the backdrop against which Nantou’s drill has to be read, not as theater, but as a rehearsal for a scenario officials increasingly treat as plausible rather than remote.
The timing made the point for them. On Thursday, as the exercise wound down, Taiwan’s defense ministry reported that China had run another “joint combat readiness patrol” around the island, warships alongside at least 22 military aircraft, including nuclear-capable H-6 bombers. Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office fired back at Lai directly. Spokesperson Zhu Fenglian called him “a destroyer of cross-strait peace, a creator of crises in the Taiwan Strait, and an instigator of war.” A rehearsal for a blockade, playing out as actual Chinese warships circled the island. Taipei is unlikely to call that a coincidence.
Inside the drill itself, the scenarios kept compounding. Field teams shot down a mock Chinese drone menacing a power plant and set up emergency food rationing. A simulated Chinese drone strike on the response center left the fate of 75 officials listed as unknown, forcing a scramble to activate a backup command post. Hospitals moved patient wards underground. Professional hackers were brought in to stress-test government networks in real time.
Nantou’s assignment in the scenario was specific: transform the county into a “rear area,” a refuge for people fleeing coastal fighting and a fallback zone for military operations once frontline troops engaged Chinese forces elsewhere on the island. Local officials, more accustomed to permits and utility complaints than wartime logistics, were grilled on how many draft-age men they could mobilize overnight and how many cans of baby formula sat in county stockpiles.
Disinformation got its own stress test. Local television broadcasts were hijacked mid-drill and replaced with Beijing propaganda. Fake flyers appeared on the street, a scenario lifted almost directly from the 2025 Taiwanese drama “Zero Day Attack.” Officials countered with mock press conferences, training participants to spot manipulated footage in real time.
If the other side attacks, they will definitely use AI to spread false information,
said Lee I-yuan, a 75-year-old borough chief who ran a community response team, describing what he took from the exercise.
Taiwan’s civil-defense drills used to draw mockery for being scripted and performative, a complaint South China Morning Post traced back to Taiwan’s first modern “Whole of Society Defence Resilience” drill in Tainan in March 2025, the island’s first systematic attempt to train civilians for conflict since the 1958 Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. What changed in Nantou this year, officials said, was integration. Reserve military commands coordinated directly with township offices. Hospitals actually relocated wards rather than just discussing it on paper. Lessons were imported explicitly from Ukraine and the Middle East about what infrastructure attacks really look like, a shift also documented independently by EconoTimes, which noted the drill’s emphasis on identifying operational weaknesses over demonstrating polish. It follows years of steadily increasing U.S. and allied attention to Taiwan’s own defense posture, including drone procurement Washington has called a “game-changer.”
Lin Fei-fan, deputy secretary-general of Taiwan’s National Security Council, framed the exercise as deterrence by rehearsal rather than pageantry. “The message to our adversary is clear: when they know Taiwan’s society is prepared, they will have to think very carefully about whether to launch such a costly war against Taiwan — one that may not succeed,” he said. Whether 370 officials debating baby formula counts in a landlocked county changes Beijing’s calculus is untestable by definition. What is measurable is how fast the gap between tabletop scenario and live headline is closing. This week, that gap ran to about a day.
