Taiwan Strait

The Taiwan Strait separates the island of Taiwan from China's Fujian province, narrowing to roughly 130 km at its tightest point. It is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes: a large share of global container traffic and semiconductor shipments transits the waterway, and Taiwan's TSMC alone produces the majority of the world's advanced logic chips.

Politically, the strait is the focal point of the cross-strait dispute between the People's Republic of China (PRC), which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and the Republic of China (ROC) government in Taipei, which has administered Taiwan since 1949 after the Chinese Civil War. Beijing has not renounced the use of force to achieve unification, while Taipei maintains de facto independence and a separate democratic political system.

Several crises have shaped the strait's strategic significance:

• First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954–55) over the offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu.
• Second Taiwan Strait Crisis (1958), marked by PRC artillery shelling of Kinmen.
• Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995–96), when PRC missile tests near Taiwan prompted the United States to deploy two carrier battle groups.
• 2022 tensions following US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's August visit to Taipei, after which the People's Liberation Army conducted large-scale live-fire exercises encircling the island.

The US position rests on the Taiwan Relations Act (1979), which commits Washington to provide Taiwan with defensive arms, and a long-standing posture of "strategic ambiguity" regarding direct military intervention. The PRC's Anti-Secession Law (2005) authorises "non-peaceful means" against formal Taiwanese independence.

Beijing disputes that the strait constitutes international waters, a position rejected by the US, Japan, and most maritime powers, which routinely conduct freedom-of-navigation transits. The median line, an informal boundary observed for decades, has been increasingly crossed by PLA aircraft and naval vessels since 2020.