On June 27, Chinese and Russian air forces carried out their 11th Joint Air Strategic Patrol, sending more than 15 aircraft across the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea and the western Pacific. Tokyo reacted immediately. But the aircraft were only part of the story: tracking data compiled from Japan's own defense advisories show the flight was closely synchronized with a wave of Chinese and Russian naval movements around Japan and Taiwan — a coordination pattern that both Chinese and Taiwanese military commentators appear to have missed entirely.
A Pattern That Was Visible Months Ago
The patrol did not happen in isolation. On June 29, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense submitted a written report to the Legislative Yuan's Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, ahead of a joint briefing on July 1 by the ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Coast Guard Administration and the Mainland Affairs Council. The report said People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy vessels have run regular "combat readiness patrols" around Taiwan since August 2022, with daily ship counts climbing from three or four to six or seven, and with the patrol area steadily widening.
None of that surprised close observers. This writer flagged the same five-to-six-vessel pattern in a column published in August 2025. An even earlier forecast has also held up: after Japan and the Philippines raised the idea of a "joint maritime boundary delimitation" on May 28, it seemed likely that China's coast guard would begin pushing more frequently into waters east of Taiwan on a semi-permanent basis, with other government ships — patrol craft, rescue vessels, oceanographic survey ships — following behind. That is largely what has happened since.
On June 20, Taiwanese outlets cited a Wall Street Journal report noting that by late May, PLA warships, including large guided-missile destroyers, had spread across waters surrounding Taiwan. A regional security official quoted in that report described this not as a one-off show of force but, in effect, an ordinary day in 2026.
That framing is worth pausing on. Composite retrospectives like this tend to stitch together observations from many sources into a single after-the-fact picture. Far rarer is the kind of day-by-day tracking that follows the same waters and the same vessel types over time, builds week-on-week and month-on-month comparisons, and only then produces a trend analysis — precisely because that kind of sustained monitoring is slow, tedious and has to be redone every time PLA behavior shifts. Too much commentary waits for a development to finish playing out before assessing it, by which point the more interesting transition has already been missed.
Why PLA Ships Rotate Every Two Weeks
The Journal report cited Michael Dahm, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer and senior researcher at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, who noted that PLA warships around Taiwan rotate on roughly two-week deployments in a continuous relay. What the report did not explain is why two weeks specifically.
The answer is basic naval logistics. Fourteen days is roughly the standard self-sustaining endurance of a combat surface ship at sea before food and other provisions begin to run low and the crew shifts into a conservation posture. The nearest resupply ports for vessels patrolling around Taiwan are Xiamen and Sandu'ao, both in Fujian Province.
The report also missed a structural shift: these patrols are no longer an Eastern Theater Navy operation alone. In recent years the PLA has folded in vessels from the Southern and Northern Theater Navies as well, rotating them through joint training and routine deployments around Taiwan — mirroring the pattern already established in the South China Sea, where Northern and Eastern Theater ships regularly rotate into the Spratly Islands rather than leaving that mission to the Southern Theater fleet alone.
Japan and Beijing Described Two Different Air Patrols
On June 26, Japan's parliament passed an amended Defense Ministry Establishment Law formally renaming the Air Self-Defense Force — in place for more than 70 years — the Japan Aerospace Self-Defense Force, extending its mission from domestic airspace into space alongside stronger satellite surveillance capability. The next day, China and Russia flew their 11th joint strategic bomber patrol.
Japan's Joint Staff Office released a tracking diagram on June 28 identifying the Chinese aircraft as H-6 bombers and J-16 fighters, and the Russian aircraft as Tu-95 bombers, Tu-142 patrol aircraft and Su-35 fighters. Chinese state media and military commentators described a far larger force: H-6K bombers, J-16 and J-11B fighters, KJ-500 airborne early warning aircraft, Y-9 special-mission planes and YY-20 tankers, framed as a complete strike, command, intelligence and refueling architecture.
Japan's public tracking data contained none of those additional Chinese aircraft types. Two explanations are plausible. One is that Beijing deliberately advertised the gap to needle Japanese surveillance. The more likely explanation is that the extra aircraft operated closer to China's own coastline in a rear-support role, outside the field of view of Japanese systems focused on the forward strategic formation.
In an unusually dense release, Japan's Joint Staff Office issued eight separate naval activity advisories on June 29 alone — three on Russian vessels, five on Chinese — covering movements between June 24 and 29 around Japan. A further three advisories followed on June 30.
Piecing the hull numbers and transit routes together produces a clear picture. A Russian Vishnya-class intelligence ship transited from the Sea of Japan toward the East China Sea on June 27 before passing into the western Pacific on June 30, consistent with electronic intelligence-gathering during concurrent U.S.-Japan exercises. A Russian Udaloy I-class destroyer crossed the Sōya Strait on June 28, while two Russian frigates and a replenishment vessel — which had been escorting a tug and six cargo ships since May — moved north through waters near Yonaguni and Iriomote into the East China Sea.
On the Chinese side, at least eight warships from all three theater navies moved through the Miyako and Ōsumi straits into the western Pacific, or through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan, between June 24 and 30: the Eastern Theater's frigate Anyang and intelligence ship Tianquanxing, destroyers Suzhou, Xi'an and Dongguan, and the Northern Theater's destroyers Xining and Guiyang and the destroyer-frigate-replenishment group of Nanchang, Yancheng and Dongpinghu. Separately, fishermen reported sighting the frigate Ziyang near the Taiwan Strait median line on June 30 — part of the standing five-to-six-ship rotation that patrols waters west and southwest of Taiwan.
Ships Moved First, Aircraft Followed, Then the Exercise Began
Cross-referencing those naval movements against the June 27 air patrol reveals a sequence Chinese commentators do not appear to have noticed: PLA Navy vessels were operating in coordination with the bomber formation, not alongside it by coincidence. The destroyers Suzhou, Xining and Guiyang were each in position in the Sea of Japan or western Pacific before the patrol and returned to home waters immediately after it concluded on June 28.
This fits a sequence this writer has tracked for years — ships deploy first, aircraft arrive later, and only then does the joint exercise formally begin, typically with an official announcement issued at the same moment. Analysts have largely missed it for two reasons: many do not treat that sequence as a reliable analytical framework, and Japan's own reporting priorities put the high-visibility bomber patrol at the center of attention, leaving the naval dimension under-examined.
The Patrol Trailed a Typhoon Into Japan
Typhoon Maekkhala tracked northeast through the Ryukyu Islands toward southwestern Japan between June 25 and 27. The China-Russia bomber formation's flight path on June 27, through the western Pacific east of the Ryukyus, followed almost the same track, with the storm leading and the aircraft following.
That timing looks deliberate. Conducting a strategic patrol immediately behind a typhoon strike applies pressure at the moment Japan's Self-Defense Forces are most stretched — diverting personnel and equipment to disaster response and straining command bandwidth. The patrol functions, in effect, as coercive signaling timed to a moment of maximum vulnerability.
Japan's tracking diagram shows the joint formation approaching airspace east of Wenzhou, in Zhejiang Province. Chinese reporting confirms the PLA declared a roughly 3,123-square-kilometer maritime exclusion zone south of Wenzhou from 6 p.m. on June 26 to 6 p.m. on June 28 — spanning the period of the air patrol almost exactly.
Wenzhou hosts a cluster of relevant PLA and coast guard facilities: a naval district responsible for near-shore defense and mine warfare, an expanded amphibious staging base at Yueqing Bay built to berth Type 071 and Type 075 amphibious ships for operations toward the northern Taiwan Strait and the Miyako Strait, and a coast guard base capable of servicing 10,000-ton-class law enforcement vessels used for East China Sea and Diaoyu Islands patrols. The alignment of the flight track, the naval dispositions near Wenzhou and the exclusion zone's timing all point toward coordinated maritime support for the bomber patrol rather than a routine airspace restriction.
Not Necessarily a Response to Wu Chao-hsieh's Disclosure
The scale of Northern and Eastern Theater naval activity near Japan and Taiwan has prompted speculation that Beijing was responding to Wu Chao-hsieh, Taiwan's former National Security Council secretary-general, who posted on X on May 23 disclosing PLA deployments across the Asia-Pacific between May 15 and 23 and stating that China had massed more than 100 vessels around the first island chain.
A more direct explanation fits the evidence better: PLA Northern and Eastern Theater ships were responding to concurrent U.S.-Japan exercises in the same waters, just as the PLA's Southern Theater Navy and coast guard have been mounting proportional responses to U.S.-Philippines patrols near the Spratly Islands in recent months.
Vessel Count Around Taiwan Jumped From Seven to Ten
Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense reported that the number of PLA vessels in waters around Taiwan rose from seven to ten between June 29 and 30. Setting aside vessels already counted under routine rotation, the increase appears to trace to warships transiting international waterways south of Miyako and Ishigaki to reach waters east of Taiwan — among them the frigate Anyang, destroyers Nanchang and Xi'an, frigate Yancheng, replenishment ship Dongpinghu and the electronic intelligence vessel Tianquanxing, which has reportedly been operating alongside PLA drones conducting surveillance in Taiwan's eastern approaches.
The Next Joint Exercise Window May Open Around July 9
As of a 9:30 a.m. announcement on July 2, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense recorded five PLA aircraft sorties — two of which crossed the median line into Taiwan's southwestern air defense identification zone — six PLA Navy vessels and five government ships operating in the surrounding air and sea space over the preceding 24 hours. Taiwan's Central Weather Administration forecasts clear, hot conditions through July 7, with a weak typhoon, Bavi, not expected to affect Taiwan until roughly July 9. That calm-weather window makes the days around July 9 a plausible candidate for the PLA Eastern Theater to stage its next "joint combat readiness patrol."
Government Ships Are Quietly Becoming the New Normal
On June 18, China's Ministry of Natural Resources announced that the survey vessel Xiangyanghong 22 had conducted marine environmental surveys east of Taiwan — inside waters Taiwan claims as its own — between June 16 and 18. Since then, the number of Chinese government vessels operating around Taiwan has ranged from three to seven.
That confirms an earlier prediction: as the PLA Navy has normalized its presence around Taiwan, Chinese coast guard, research and maritime administration vessels are following the same script, institutionalizing their own persistent footprint. The one constraint that has held so far is that these military, coast guard and government vessels continue to operate outside Taiwan's 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone — a boundary worth watching closely for how much longer it holds.
*The author is a research fellow at the Chinese Strategic Society. （Related： Opinion | China's Itu Aba Incursion Signals a New Phase in Cross-Strait Pressure ｜ Latest ）
