Albie Lee leads a double life. The 29-year-old woman, who has a tattoo of a skateboard duck on her body, works as a housekeeper in Hsinchu City, the center of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. On weekends, she prepares for a possible military attack by China on Taiwan.
While the United States is distracted by the war in Iran and consuming huge resources, China is conducting increasingly frequent military exercises around Taiwan, seemingly aimed at intimidating the 23 million residents of this self-governing island. But for Lee, China's intimidation tactics have only strengthened her determination to defend Taiwan. Taiwan is an outpost of democracy that produces more than 90% of the world's most advanced computer chips. Along with thousands of ordinary people, including artists, academics, firefighters and engineers, she joins a growing civil defense movement that organizes realistic simulations of disasters.
Today, in addition to cleaning supplies, Lee also carries a carefully curated first aid kit. "I don't want to live under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party," she said. "If China invades, I will never be willing to hand over my fate to others."
Since the CCP defeated the Kuomintang in a civil war in 1949, the Chinese government has insisted that the island of Taiwan, where the defeated Kuomintang troops retreated, must be reunited with the mainland. This “unswerving historical mission,” as Chinese President Xi Jinping calls it, appears to be getting closer to being realized. According to U.S. intelligence, Xi Jinping has ordered that the People's Liberation Army - the world's largest standing army - must be able to annex the island by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army.
Although there is currently no sign of imminent offensive plans, China is continuing to demonstrate its superiority over Taiwan's armed forces. Over the past year, the People's Liberation Army has increased its use of "gray zone" tactics, or operations that remain below the threshold of war. These include live-fire simulation exercises of naval blockades and almost daily cross-border patrols through the center line of the Taiwan Strait, the narrow strait between mainland China and the main island of Taiwan. This summer, Chinese ships even patrolled the waters east of Taiwan, where Taiwan's main backer, the United States, is most likely to deliver military support.
For nearly 50 years, Taiwan's fragile status quo has been maintained by an ambiguous U.S. policy called "strategic ambiguity." The United States supported the Kuomintang during the civil war and has since acquiesced to Taiwan's right to exist, but at the same time recognized Beijing as the only legitimate government of China. But at the same time, the United States also sells billions of dollars worth of weapons to Taiwan every year, but has never made it clear whether it will send troops to defend Taiwan if it is attacked.
Today, this ambiguous position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Not only is China ramping up its cognitive warfare, showing off its military might and flooding Taiwan with propaganda, but the United States is proving to be a more erratic, transactional ally. President Trump, while sometimes harshly critical of China, has also expressed admiration for strongman leader Xi Jinping. After visiting China in May this year, he even used a US$14 billion arms sales package to Taiwan that Congress had approved but he had not yet signed as a "very good bargaining chip" with Beijing. That unnerves many Taiwanese, who worry that Trump could leave Taiwan weakened and isolated to face China at his next meeting with Chinese leaders in September.
Taiwan is considered one of the most dangerous geopolitical hot spots in the world. If a military conflict breaks out there involving the two superpowers, it could have a devastating blow to the global economy that relies on Taiwanese chips. This dangerous situation stimulated the development of Taiwan's civil defense movement. More than 30 volunteer groups have sprung up across the island in the past few years, some spurred by Beijing's threat of force in the Taiwan Strait, others inspired by Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression, and others dissatisfied with growing political divisions within Taiwan.
In 2024, the newly elected President Lai Chengde proposed a "whole-of-society" defense policy, which injected impetus into these groups. This month, Taiwan held civil defense drills alongside the military's annual drills as part of the plan to test how ordinary citizens would respond to a Chinese incursion that disrupted all communications, including internet services. As Lai Ching-te said last year when he proposed a strategy to build social resilience: "Every citizen is the front line in protecting democracy and freedom."
Although these civil defense groups are still relatively small—with only a few thousand core participants—they reflect the evolution of Taiwanese identity, especially among young people. In 1992, only 18% of the population considered themselves primarily Taiwanese rather than from other provinces; a recent poll shows that now more than two-thirds hold this view. Only 3% consider themselves to be fully Chinese - a proportion similar to Taiwan's aboriginal population.
This shift in identity shapes visions for Taiwan's future. Over the past 30 years, the proportion of the population that supports becoming part of China has dropped from one-fifth to less than 10%. Today, most Taiwanese say they support a status quo somewhere between independence and reunification. They want Taiwan to continue to be a prosperous, democratic society. According to a poll conducted in January this year by Taiwan's top research institution Academia Sinica, if China's invasion threatens this status quo, 60% of the people expressed their willingness to fight for it.
Ten years ago, there was no civil defense movement in Taiwan, and there were only a few tactical simulation players like Anfernee Huang. He is an industrial designer who has just passed his thirties. He said he was initially drawn to survival games because they were "a little bit dangerous and exciting" to play. (His English name comes from former NBA star Anfernee Hardaway.) In 2016, he and his friends began intense technical and physical training (he still runs marathons to this day) and transformed himself into the style of an elite special forces team, with camouflage oil paint on his face. Five years later, one of his friends created the "Taiwan Doomsday Survival Society" on Facebook, which has now attracted nearly 20,000 members.
It would be easy to mistake these early disaster preparers for some kind of peripheral militia. But Anfernee Wong and a small group of them formed a community emergency response team to help ordinary people prepare for disasters and a possible Chinese invasion. As tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait, these disaster preparers are using their experience to help train new recruits to civil defense. "China's infiltration and military exercises made me realize that ordinary people need to take initiative and be prepared," Anfernee Huang said.
Taiwan’s most influential civil defense organization is Black Bear Academy, a four-year-old nonprofit that is said to have trained more than 100,000 Taiwanese in everything from survival skills to “preemptively detecting” Beijing’s intensive propaganda offensive. With the support of millions of dollars in funding from a semiconductor tycoon, Black Bear Academy also organizes several large-scale real-life exercises every year. Like the one Albie Lee attended. The academy's name is derived from the Japanese word for "bear," and its website also sells "Black Bear Warriors" dolls and charms.
The vast majority of participants in Black Bear Academy training courses are between the ages of 25 and 45. While older disaster preparers are mostly male, more than 70% of civil defense activists are female. "Women are more willing to protect their families and the country," said Zhu Fuming, CEO of Black Bear College. "Many women are highly motivated and want to know what they can do in a crisis to protect their families and those around them."
The confrontation between the two sides is a typical asymmetrical contest. In terms of land area, population and military strength, China with a population of 1.4 billion has an overwhelming advantage over Taiwan with a population of 23 million. The Chinese army has 2 million troops, while Taiwan has only 230,000; the number of Chinese naval ships also leads Taiwan by a similar proportion. Even in the number of fighter jets that are the core of Taiwan's defense, China has an advantage of nearly five to one.
Faced with such a disparity, Taiwan will have to rely on the so-called porcupine defense strategy, which is to adopt a series of smaller-scale tactical means to make the cost of an invasion too expensive and unbearable for the opponent. For example, Taiwan's newly developed drone fleets could help disrupt amphibious landing operations. Civil defense groups are another thorn in the porcupine's body - they refuse to surrender prematurely and will work to maintain communication lines, conduct search and rescue, evacuate refugees and provide emergency medical care.
H.E. Huang, 20, who is studying animal science, believes civil defense can play a vital role. Like his peers, Mr Huang grew up amid prosperity and freedom - the fruits of the island's switch to democracy nearly 40 years ago - but also witnessed the growing threat from China. As a teenager, he says, “I always wondered what ordinary people would be able to do if a war broke out.”
Mr. Huang obtained the first-aider qualification certificate and joined a civil defense group after entering university. "History has repeatedly shown that even overwhelming military power does not guarantee victory," he said, pointing to Ukraine's tenacious resistance to Russian aggression. "The morale, determination and organizational capabilities of the local population can play a decisive role in the outcome of the conflict."
In a society so divided, building this unity is no easy task. As civil defense groups accelerate training, many Taiwanese remain unconcerned about the threat, or even more unkindly criticize civil defense advocates for spreading panic and advocating war. Attitudes toward civil defense echo the central divide in Taiwanese politics, between the president's Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang, which controls the Legislative Yuan through a coalition of parties. According to an informal survey, almost everyone who participated in the civil defense exercise supported the DPP. Supporters of the Kuomintang accuse them of deliberately provoking conflict with China for political gain, while supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party in turn accuse the Kuomintang of acting as a mouthpiece for Beijing and parroting Chinese propaganda.
One of China's major weapons is cognitive warfare, which is a systematic attack on its opponents' perception of reality, identity and political will. “Nowhere in the world has been bombarded by more cognitive warfare than Taiwan,” said Black Bear Academy CEO Fred Chu. He pointed out that China's propaganda and disinformation and military exercises along Taiwan's coast are all designed to weaken Taiwan's determination to defend itself.
Black Bear Academy and other groups hold workshops to help people identify and counter disinformation. This stems from a consensus that the key battlefield in modern conflicts is no longer land or sea, but the collective psyche of entire societies. The ultimate goal of Taiwan’s civil defense is what some call “cognitive sovereignty,” the ability to define its own reality and history without being manipulated by false information.
