China Deploys 100-Plus Warships in Biggest East Asian Maritime Drill Yet

China’s mass sortie echoes the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis when the PLA fired missiles near Taiwanese ports, and recalls the Soviet Navy’s 1970 ‘Okean’ global exercise—both large-scale demonstrations timed to test political resolve without crossing a formal red line. Strategically, the move fits Beijing’s years-long shift toward continuous, far-sea presence and anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) posturing designed to complicate U.S.–ally reinforcement plans; it also probes the nascent security coordination Japan and Taiwan have signalled after Taipei’s US$40 bn defence bump and Tokyo’s hints of intervention. Whether this flotilla becomes routine or an outlier will inform the region’s arms-race trajectory: a century from now historians may see December 2025 as either an inflection point when China normalised blue-water coercive diplomacy—much like the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 1905 emergence—or a blip that catalysed stronger multilateral counter-balancing, curbing escalation. The episode matters because it tests crisis-management mechanisms in the Indo-Pacific’s most heavily trafficked seaways at a scale not witnessed since the Cold War.