The pressure from across the Taiwan Strait has not eased. During the Lunar New Year period, Chinese military aircraft once again crossed the median line, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.
Joseph Wen has been tracking movements like these, not from a control room or military post, but from his own screen.
At 27, the Taiwanese graduate student has assembled one of the most detailed open-source maps of the People’s Liberation Army. More than 7,000 sites are marked across China, from bases and training grounds to military academies and defense industry facilities. What began as a personal project now draws attention from military analysts and observers beyond Taiwan.
A different path into the military world
The trajectory that led him here did not begin with strategy or security studies.
Wen studied music at Soochow University. Composition was his field. The shift came gradually, shaped by early exposure. As a child, he watched military documentaries on National Geographic and Discovery Channel with his father, who would pause to explain the stories behind the footage. Later, a classmate introduced him to Taiwan’s own military issues.
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By high school, his focus had widened again.
In an interview with Voice of America, Wen recalled writing a paper as a first-year student examining political dynamics in Beijing following the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress. The study mapped factional alignments within the leadership, including the so-called Shanghai faction, princelings, and the Communist Youth League faction.
That interest, once academic, would later take on a more practical form.
Building a map from what is already public
China has set 2027 as a target for achieving the capability to use force against Taiwan. Its military activity has increasingly reflected that goal: aircraft crossing the median line, naval maneuvers around the island, and exercises simulating what are described as “decapitation strikes.”
On Feb. 19, 2025, Taiwan’s defense ministry reported another such operation. Beginning at 9:36 a.m., it tracked 14 sorties by Chinese aircraft, including J-10, J-11, and J-16 fighters, along with KJ-500 early warning planes. Ten crossed the median line, entering airspace to the north, center, and southwest of Taiwan, coordinating with naval vessels under the designation of a “joint combat readiness patrol.”
Taiwan’s response has taken shape over years, not days. A decade of steady increases in defense spending has led to plans for a “Special Budget for Enhancing Defense Resilience and Asymmetric Capabilities,” covering 2026 to 2033, with a proposed ceiling of NT$1.25 trillion, about US$39 billion. The proposal remains stalled in the Legislative Yuan.
Within that broader picture, Wen’s work sits in a different space.
His project is built entirely from open-source intelligence, drawing on publicly available material to reconstruct what is often assumed to be hidden.
The turning point came during the pandemic.
Late one night, while reviewing his own custom maps on Google Maps, Wen noticed something that seemed obvious once seen. Chinese military enthusiasts had already mapped Taiwan’s armed forces. There was no equivalent map for China’s military.
He began to build one himself.
Using Google Maps as a base, he created an interactive system marking the locations of PLA facilities across all five service branches. Bases, training grounds, academies, and industrial sites began to appear, one by one.
Much of the data came from Chinese state media.
Wen studies footage from China Central Television closely, treating it not as propaganda but as raw material. Buildings in the background, road layouts, terrain features, even brief establishing shots, all become clues. Through geolocation analysis, he matches those fragments to real-world locations and adds them to the map.
What is shown, even briefly, can be enough.
Attention and backlash
The project did not remain obscure for long.
Online, some users praised the level of detail and the ability to synthesize scattered information into a coherent picture. Others reacted differently. Wen has received threats from Chinese nationalist internet users.
He described one case in his interview with Voice of America.
A CCTV propaganda series titled “Commanders Speak on Strengthening the Military” opens each episode with footage of a group army headquarters. By comparing the buildings shown in those opening sequences, Wen identified the location of the PLA’s 72nd Group Army headquarters in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province.
The information had been there, visible, but unassembled.
Wen’s work brings it together.