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China on October 22 conducted live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

The bellicose move follows a 13-hour simulated blockade of Taiwan on October 14 and 15. The People’s Liberation Army, in the Joint Sword-2024B exercises, employed a record 153 planes as well 26 ships, including the Liaoning, one of the country’s three aircraft carriers.

The Chinese Coast Guard participated in the massive drill as well, carrying out, as the Economist noted, an “unprecedented” patrol around the main Taiwan island.

The drill, according to the Chinese Coast Guard, was a “practical action to control Taiwan island in accordance with the law based on the one-China principle.”

The announced drill zones for Joint Sword-2024B were only 24 nautical miles from Taiwan’s shoreline, closer than zones in previous exercises.

Observers suggested the presence of Coast Guard vessels, dedicated to domestic law enforcement activities, signaled that China was buttressing its claim that Taiwan was Chinese territory.

Beijing maintains that the island has been an “inalienable” part of China since time immemorial. The People’s Republic has never exercised control over Taiwan. In fact, no Chinese regime has ever held indisputable sovereignty to it. Chiang Kai-shek, the first Chinese ruler to exercise control of the whole island, arrived in 1949.

Taiwan officials have told visiting foreigners that they expect Beijing to impose a quarantine over the island republic in the coming months.

“With Joint Sword, the Communist Party of China is developing and finalizing their quarantine concept for Taiwan,” John Mills, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told Gatestone. “They know a blockade is an act of war, so they’re playing the quarantine game, modeled after what President Kennedy did in 1963 for Cuba.”

“When the Chinese initiate their quarantine, they will target vessels carrying weapons shipments, such as the recent one that ferried Harpoon missiles,” said Mills, who was director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “They will also target civil aircraft carrying personalities that they want to render to Chinese control. Undersea cables will also likely be cut.”

When will this happen? There is wide disagreement. Mills believes that the Chinese could declare their quarantine this year or soon after.

A quarantine is a cunning maneuver at a time that China is not prepared for a full-scale war and is not ready to start hostilities by launching an invasion of Taiwan’s main island.

Not prepared? Xi Jinping does not trust the Chinese military, a war on Taiwan would be extremely unpopular with the Chinese people, and the Chinese regime is extremely casualty averse.

Xi, therefore, is trying to intimidate everyone else into submission. “The purposes of the exercises are to threaten Taiwan’s security to the point that the Taiwan people lose confidence in their government and to change the status quo of a Taiwan separate from China,” Elizabeth Freund Larus of the Atlantic Council Global China Hub told Fox News Digital.

“They were using a very old Chinese strategy called ‘encircling the point/striking the reinforcement'” said Chang Ching of the R.O.C. Society for Strategic Studies, who examined the track of Russian and Chinese vessels before Joint Sword-2024B. “The real target is the United States,” the Taiwan analyst told Fox. They were “practicing ways to ambush the U.S. Navy if it heads towards an already held-hostage Taiwan.”

Xi may think he can take Taiwan with just a quarantine, which is not an act of war, but the risk for him is that if the move fails he has to move to a full blockade, which is. The Chinese military announced that Joint Sword-2024B practices a “key port blockade.” A quarantine, therefore, could start a chain of events that leads to conflict.

For a blockade to be successful, it will almost certainly have to include sovereign Japanese territory, specifically the island of Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost inhabited territory. Taiwan’s mountains are visible from this small island south of Taipei. The U.S. has a mutual defense treaty with Japan, which means once China declares a blockade, the resulting war will pull in the U.S.

If Xi’s quarantine fails, he cannot back down. At the moment, only the most belligerent answers are considered acceptable in senior Communist Party circles. The extreme hostility suggests something is wrong in the Chinese capital, so the world should be prepared for anything, at anyplace, and at any time.

China is capable of the inconceivable. The regime released a propaganda barrage on October 19, showcasing China’s military might just two days after Xi, who is also chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission, had inspected a brigade of the People’s Liberation Army’s Rocket Force.

Xi urged the missile troops to, among other things, sharpen “combat capabilities.”

The Rocket Force, which test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile in the general direction of Hawaii on September 25, has responsibility for most of the country’s nuclear weapons.

Xi’s implied threats to use these weapons are particularly ominous. We have to ask ourselves: When in history has a militant regime engaged in belligerent acts and constantly threatened to go to war but did not actually do so?

Nothing is inevitable, but now there is an almost irresistible momentum to war.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.