At a critical port on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, there is a sudden bang of explosions.
For emergency crews, it is a race to respond, attend to the injured and contain what damage they can. It is noisy and chaotic.
But this time, it is just a rehearsal.
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In fact, what we have been invited to watch is part of a programme of nationwide drills to test Taiwan’s civil resilience.
To ask, in essence, if its people are ready for war.
And there are clearly questions here about whether they are.
Penghu is an archipelago that sits about 31 miles (50km) west of Taiwan’s main island. It could be an early, easy target for China – and that means preparation here is vital.
But observers who have travelled from Taipei to assess proceedings are not entirely impressed.
“Do you think with just the staff here now it will be enough?” asks one senior government official at a community hall where about a dozen staff are practising handing out food and supplies.
“Of course not! There will be more than 7,000 people queuing up. They’ll wait from morning until the afternoon and get nothing. It’s completely impossible.”
‘China is preparing to invade’
The scenarios might be imagined, but the threat behind them is very real, and it’s being met with a new sense of urgency.
And now, in an interview with Sky News, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Wu Chihchung lays out the reality in perhaps some of the starkest terms used by this administration to date.
“The population need to not be naive like in the past,” he says.
“China is preparing to invade Taiwan.”
It comes at a time when increasingly sophisticated military activity and grey zone incursions from China have combined with a more robust approach from Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te, resulting in the most febrile atmosphere in the Taiwan Strait for decades.
Add into the mix Donald Trump’s presidency casting doubt over whether Taiwan can rely on US support in the event of a crisis, and questions about Taiwan’s readiness feel more pressing now than ever before.
“Taiwan alone, facing China – we will never be ready,” concedes Wu. “It’s not possible, China is so big, so huge.”
His words reflect harsh realities in Taiwan.
Self-governing and democratic, it is viewed by China as a breakaway province.
Under President Xi Jinping, the long-held aim of reunification has been turbocharged – he has reportedly asked his troops to be ready for a potential invasion as early as 2027.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s new president is seen as a deeply provocative figure on the mainland, with Beijing depicting him in propaganda as a parasite “courting ultimate destruction”.
In Lai Ching-te’s first year in office, he has demonstrated a willingness to go further in both words and policies than any who have preceded him.
He has not only described China as “a foreign hostile force” but has introduced a raft of new security measures, including the reinstating of a military court-style system, the deportation of pro-China influencers and a spike in the number of people arrested for espionage – four times as many last year as in 2021.
And all this has not gone unnoticed by China.
China’s grey zone tactics
The 14 months since Lai’s inauguration have been marked by an increase in Chinese action: numerous large-scale military drills, live-fire exercises and full encirclement of the island by jets and ships.
Beijing also appears to have been testing new capabilities, with onlookers in China taking videos of what appeared to be a test of a huge amphibious bridging system, a possible path on to Taiwan.
But perhaps the most noteworthy change has been the marked increase in so-called grey zone incursions, with China encroaching slowly in ways that are hard for Taiwan to respond to.
On Penghu, these tactics are a daily reality and are impacting lives and livelihoods.
“In the past, our fishing boats could go directly to mainland China. They’d even go ashore, maybe grab a meal,” explains Yen Te-Fu, who heads up the Penghu Fishermen’s Association.
“But fishermen are now too afraid to sail to China. When they fish in our own waters, they constantly see Chinese Coast Guard ships. They’re genuinely scared.”
He says it’s worse now than ever “because Lai Ching-te’s stance is even clearer”.
But the use of coastguard vessels to enforce new Chinese-set norms is just one tactic, according to observers.
Research published by the Taiwanese thinktank Research Project on China’s Defence Affairs (RCDA) has recorded new incidents of so-called “three-no” ships crossing the median line.
These are ships with no name, no registered home port and no registration certificate.
Thirty ships crossed on the eve of the one-year anniversary of President Lai’s inauguration as an “evidently disguised maritime militia ship”, the RCDA says.
While not against maritime law, it is nonetheless a serious accusation.
“This is nothing but a sheer slander, like a thief shouting ‘catch the thief’,” said Senior Colonel Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesperson for China’s ministry of national defence, when we put it to him.
“The relevant actions conducted by the PLA in the Taiwan Strait are necessary measures to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Transactional Trump ‘constantly changing’
Conversations about Taiwan’s security have changed since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Like most countries, the US does not share formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, but it is treaty-bound to supply it with defensive arms, and previous presidents have hinted they would do more if needed.
But Trump has accused Taiwan of “stealing” the US semiconductor industry, slapped it with a 32% tariff rate and refused to say if he would come to Taiwan’s defence (the tariff has been paused while negotiations continue).
At a baseball game in the northern city of Taoyuan, people didn’t hold back their views.
“I think he’s quite crazy,” one woman tells us.
“He’s constantly changing, there’s no credibility at all,” says a man. “It’s always America First, not caring about any other country.”
Government figures, of course, remain more diplomatic. Lai described the recent tariff negotiation as merely “frictions between friends”, but there is a sense that they know they cannot afford to become alienated from Trump.
In fact, TSMC, Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading manufacturer of semiconductor chips, recently announced an additional $100bn investment to build factories in the US.
Semiconductors are the vital chips needed to power the modern world. Taiwan makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced ones, and the industry is seen as one of the key reasons the West could come to its support.
The US investment was thus criticised by some as a divergence of Taiwan’s greatest defensive asset, a claim the government here bats away.
“America has also given us a lot,” insists deputy foreign minister Wu. “The American army is working hard to maintain peace in the region.
“Donald Trump certainly knows that without Taiwanese chips, he cannot make America great again.”
Taiwan’s ‘wake-up call’ on defence
With more concern over US support for Taiwan, come questions on whether the island could defend itself.
In recent years, there has been a concerted push from the Taiwanese government to better equip itself with the type of asymmetric weaponry that would be needed to resist China.
Inspired by the experiences of Ukraine, additional drone manufacturers were given contracts in 2022 to help rapidly scale up production of military-grade drones.
But data from the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology shows that there is still a long way to go.
Drone production capacity in the year to April 2025 was only around 5% of the 180,000 units Taiwan wants to be producing annually by 2028.
Thunder Tiger was one of the firms given a contract and its general manager Gene Su says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “wake-up call” for Taiwanese military procurement.
But more needs to be done, he adds.
“I believe we are speeding up, but I believe that it’s not yet there,” he says.
In his dealings with the government, he feels that Trump has changed the equation, with an uptick of defence purchasing.
But even with these renewed efforts, without help from allies, it is still unlikely Taiwan could hold out.
China has always been resolute and consistent.
It says the Taiwan question is purely an internal affair of China and that the Lai administration is a separatist force, which is the root cause of disruption to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.
It also says there is “no such thing” as a deputy foreign minister in Taiwan.
The status quo has kept Taiwan safe for nearly 80 years and the government here insists that maintaining it is their priority, but that has rarely felt so vulnerable.
