Taiwan Slows Internet to Text-Only in Han Kuang Drill
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- Taiwan's Han Kuang exercises concluded with telecom operators throttling mobile web traffic to 256 Kbps for 30 minutes in Taipei and six other cities, making it difficult to exchange anything other than texts despite 5G normally being available
- President Lai Ching-te apologized for the inconvenience, calling it "a necessary drill" and asking for "understanding and support"
- A Taipei metro station shut its gates for an air raid simulation Thursday afternoon, trapping passengers including Hong Kong tourist Allen Hsieh, who waited 30 minutes to be released and said he "did not expect it to be so real"
- Lai also visited a hospital drilling the relocation of critical operations to underground facilities, part of this year's expanded civilian-integration focus
- The Taipei Times reported the exercises deliberately moved away from past urban resilience drills that "went largely unnoticed" toward realistic, disruptive scenarios coordinated with local governments
- Taiwan's Defense Ministry said 18 Chinese warplanes and 11 navy ships operated around the island between Wednesday and Thursday morning, part of China's daily military presence near Taiwan
Why it matters: Past Taipei urban resilience drills "went largely unnoticed" because they weren't disruptive, the article notes — but this year's iteration throttled mobile data and shut metro gates, a deliberate shift toward realistic civilian disruption. With 18 Chinese warplanes and 11 navy ships detected around Taiwan in a single day, the drills normalize public participation in invasion-prep scenarios as cross-strait tensions intensify.
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