Taiwan Builds Civil Defense Network Amid Rising Threat From Beijing

As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intensifies military pressure and cognitive warfare against Taiwan, a growing civil-defense movement has taken root across Taiwanese society.

From learning first aid, evacuation procedures, communications, and wilderness survival to identifying disinformation and countering cognitive warfare, an increasing number of civilian groups are participating in crisis-response training. Their goal is to establish, alongside the government and military, a defense network driven by civilian participation.

According to The New York Times, China has increased the frequency of its military exercises around Taiwan in recent years, using large-scale drills and deployments to demonstrate its ability to pressure and potentially encircle the island. The newspaper reported in October 2024 that Beijing had stepped up such exercises following the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. Separately, The Times noted that then-CIA Director William Burns had said Chinese leader Xi Jinping instructed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready to conduct a potential invasion of Taiwan by 2027. U.S. officials have emphasized that the 2027 target refers to military readiness and does not mean Xi has decided to invade Taiwan that year. Although there are currently no clear indications that Beijing is preparing for an imminent invasion, its increasingly frequent military exercises have added to the security pressure facing Taiwan.

The issue has become more pressing as the United States faces other geopolitical conflicts and increasingly complicated demands on its diplomatic and military resources. This has prompted greater debate within Taiwan over whether Washington would be able to provide timely assistance in the event of a crisis. Some observers even worry that if U.S. policy toward Taiwan shifts further toward a transactional approach, the framework of cross-Strait security that has historically relied on “strategic ambiguity” could face new challenges.

Taiwan’s unique geopolitical position means that the risks extend beyond cross-Strait relations. Taiwan is a critical hub in the global semiconductor supply chain. If a military conflict involving the two major powers, China and the United States, were to erupt in the Taiwan Strait, it could not only trigger a regional security crisis but also have a profound impact on the global economy and technology industries.

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It is against this backdrop that Taiwan’s civil-defense movement has gradually taken shape. In recent years, more than 30 civilian volunteer organizations have emerged across Taiwan. Participants have different motivations: some are responding to China’s escalating military intimidation; others have been inspired by Ukraine’s experience of nationwide resistance during the Russia-Ukraine war; and some are concerned about Taiwan’s domestic political polarization and social divisions, believing that basic capabilities for dealing with major crises should be developed during peacetime.

President Lai Ching-te’s promotion of the “Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience” policy since 2024 has also brought greater attention to civilian defense groups. The government seeks to link the military, civil defense, medical services, energy, transportation, and communications systems in order to strengthen Taiwan’s overall resilience in the face of war, disasters, and other major crises.

Shifting identity: More than 60% of Taiwanese willing to stand up and fight for Taiwan

The rise of the civil-defense movement also reflects Taiwan’s long-term shift in national and social identity. According to National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center, only 17.6 percent of respondents identified solely as Taiwanese when its polling began in 1992, while 25.5 percent identified solely as Chinese. More recently, a Pew Research Center survey found that 67 percent of adults identified as primarily Taiwanese, compared with just three percent who identified as primarily Chinese. Most Taiwanese continue to favor maintaining some form of the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, while attitudes toward resisting a potential Chinese attack have also evolved.

A poll conducted by Taiwan’s Academia Sinica earlier this year found that about 60 percent of respondents said they would be willing to fight if China used military force to change the status quo in Taiwan. This willingness does not necessarily mean that everyone is prepared to take up arms. Rather, it reflects a growing awareness among some Taiwanese of the role they themselves could play in a major crisis.

Among these groups, the Kuma Academy (Black Bear Academy), a civil-defense organization established about four years ago, has become one of the most prominent examples. The organization says it has trained more than 100,000 people. Its courses cover basic survival skills, first aid and evacuation, as well as information assessment and cognitive-warfare awareness. It also regularly conducts large-scale field exercises to help participants understand how to maintain essential societal functions when confronted with a major crisis.

It is worth noting that civil-defense participants are not predominantly men. The Kuma Academy says that most course participants are between 25 and 45 years old, with women accounting for more than 70 percent of participants. The organization says many female trainees are primarily motivated by a desire to have the ability to protect themselves, their families, and those around them in the event of a crisis.

For Taiwan, civil defense is also an important component of its “porcupine strategy.”

Compared with China’s enormous population and military capabilities, Taiwan is at a clear disadvantage in terms of troop numbers, warships, and military aircraft. It is therefore difficult for Taiwan to compete with China simply by matching its quantity of military hardware. The core of the so-called “porcupine strategy” is to use mobile, dispersed, low-cost, and difficult-to-destroy defensive capabilities to increase the costs of launching an attack and maintaining an occupation.

Combining drones with whole-of-society defense to build multi-layered asymmetric capabilities

In recent years, Taiwan has increasingly invested in asymmetric capabilities such as drones as part of efforts to complicate a potential Chinese landing operation. Taiwan’s 2025 Quadrennial Defense Review says UAVs and other asymmetric weapons are intended to strengthen homeland defense and strike enemy vessels and vehicles during landing operations. Civilian resilience could form another layer of this defense. Taiwan’s Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience program calls for civilian-force training, evacuation and medical preparedness, protection of communications and transportation networks, and measures to keep essential functions operating during emergencies. Government exercises have included mass evacuations, shelter operations, first aid, emergency medical care, and distribution of critical supplies.

But the civil-defense movement faces another challenge: how to build a shared sense of collective defense in a highly politically and socially divided environment.

Some people believe that frequent discussion of war and a potential Chinese invasion could cause panic, and have even criticized civil-defense groups for creating “war anxiety.” For many people, as long as war has not actually broken out, preparations for a crisis can easily be dismissed as unnecessary alarmism.

Civil-defense groups, however, argue that the threats that need to be addressed are not limited to missiles and warships. Information warfare and psychological warfare are also part of the threat.

Cognitive warfare opens another battlefield: ‘Cognitive sovereignty’ becomes a new civil-defense challenge

In recent years, China has increasingly combined military pressure against Taiwan with disinformation and cognitive-warfare operations. According to a Taiwan National Security Bureau report, Beijing has used fake and compromised social-media accounts, influencers, state-linked media, AI-generated content, and platforms such as TikTok and YouTube to shape public perceptions in Taiwan. The report found that China has also used PLA exercises as opportunities to amplify narratives about its ability to blockade Taiwan and discourage expectations of foreign assistance. Taiwan’s 2025 National Defense Report describes such operations as an effort to weaken Taiwanese national identity and willingness to resist while sowing divisions within society. Against this backdrop, civil-defense advocates increasingly view the information and psychological environment—not only the traditional land, sea, and air domains—as an important part of Taiwan’s defense against coercion.

As a result, some civil-defense groups have begun organizing media-literacy and disinformation-identification workshops, encouraging people not to trust unverified information during emergencies and to avoid spreading false information while in a state of panic. Beyond improving people’s ability to assess information, these training programs are also described by some advocates as an effort to establish “cognitive sovereignty”—giving Taiwanese society the ability to independently assess the reality it faces rather than allowing external propaganda to shape the collective will.

However, the civil-defense movement is still some distance from becoming a consensus across Taiwanese society. Young people involved in civil defense say that when they promote crisis preparedness to friends, relatives, or members of the general public, they often encounter ridicule or even sarcasm. Many people remain unwilling to openly discuss the possibility of war.

This has become one of the biggest challenges facing Taiwan’s effort to promote “whole-of-society defense resilience:” how to make people aware of the need for crisis preparedness without creating panic.

The Lai administration has therefore also sought to reduce the direct association between “civil defense” and “war,”emphasizing that civil defense can also encompass the ability to respond to earthquakes, typhoons, major disasters, and other emergencies. By framing it as “disaster response” rather than simply “war preparedness,” the government hopes to ease public concerns and encourage more people to participate.