China’s military is intensifying preparations to seize Taiwan, should Beijing order the use of force to subjugate the democratic island of 23 million people.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is dispatching growing numbers of air force jets, naval ships, and troops in mock takeover drills, while gradually encroaching deeper into the waters and skies surrounding Taiwan.

A massive PLA joint exercise last week practiced blockading the island – Beijing’s latest escalation in its use of the military “stick” to try to coerce Taiwan into unification. China’s Communist-led government has never ruled Taiwan, but has claimed the island for decades and vowed to annex it – by force, if necessary.

“China is using force to show ... its intentions, its credibility, and its resolve – and all that adds up to a pretty dangerous state of affairs,” says Drew Thompson, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

China creeps closer

The latest drills involved a record 125 aircraft and drew closer to the island than previous ones. China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, took part, as did a significant number of vessels from China’s coast guard, the largest in the world. Dubbed “Joint Sword,” the drills simulated cutting off key Taiwan ports and assaulting sea and ground targets, according to China’s Eastern PLA Theater Command.

Beijing made it clear that the overarching goal of the military action was political – calling it “a stern warning to the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan Independence’ forces,” in the words of PLA spokesperson Senior Capt. Li Xi. The drills came just days after Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, gave a national day address in which he vowed to “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”

PLA Eastern Theatre Command/Reuters

Members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army take part in the "Joint Sword-2024B" military drills around Taiwan from an undisclosed location, in this still from a video released by the PLA Eastern Theater Command, Oct. 14, 2024.

Indeed, a day after the Oct. 14 military exercises, Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited an island county in southeastern Fujian province just across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan, and called for promoting “national identity among Taiwan compatriots.” Mr. Xi’s message to Taiwanese was unmistakable – economic, trade, and cultural benefits await those who cooperate with the unification goal, while those who resist will meet with military retaliation.

Mr. Xi “is personally calling the shots on Taiwan,” says David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “[He’s] trying to split Taiwan and ... show there is another path.”

China’s growing use of force around Taiwan also has concrete military benefits for China, experts say, with the exercises providing important training in joint operations for PLA forces.

Moreover, the frequent, ever-closer incursions of PLA jets and ships are effectively shrinking Taiwan’s warning time, Taiwan defense officials say. They serve to wear down Taiwan’s much smaller military by forcing it to respond continuously – day or night.

They also help normalize the Chinese military presence, making it more difficult for Taiwan’s defenders to gauge when an action marks the first stage of an actual attack, or just another patrol – potentially giving China a greater element of surprise.

“It’s increasingly difficult to recognize the difference between a routine exercise or patrol, and the opening salvo of a conflict,” says Mr. Sacks, which could “help China with a bolt from the blue or a decapitation strike on Taiwan.”

What a blockade would mean for Taiwan

The PLA maneuvers also provide useful information to Taiwan and its main unofficial ally, the United States, which is bound by American law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.

For example, the drills highlight China’s preparations for blockading Taiwan, either as a stand-alone coercive measure or as a precursor to a full-scale invasion, experts say.

Taiwan is vulnerable to a blockade. International trade accounts for about two-thirds of Taiwan’s gross domestic product. And the island relies on imports for nearly 100% of its energy and 70% of its food, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

China’s coast guard played a major role in the latest exercise, surrounding Taiwan with its vessels for the first time. “This was a concrete action to manage and control the Taiwan island in accordance with the one-China principle,” coast guard spokesperson Liu Dejun said in an official statement.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

A Taiwanese navy Kuang Hua VI-class missile boat moves within the harbor of Keelung, Taiwan, Oct. 14, 2024.

Employing the coast guard to quarantine Taiwan would allow Beijing to depict its actions as internal law enforcement – a move that could complicate international intervention on Taiwan’s behalf, experts say. By controlling access to Taiwan by commercial ships and aircraft – even temporarily – it could advance its sovereignty claims, while undermining the credibility of Taiwan’s government.

In contrast, a full-fledged PLA military blockade of Taiwan would be considered an act of war.

Beijing could impose a full blockade to try to compel the Taiwan government to capitulate to China’s unification demands – without firing a shot. But this would also afford time for the U.S. military and potentially other allies to come to Taiwan’s defense.

Indeed, Taipei’s surrender is far from a given. “Democracy is the core of Taiwanese identity,” says Mr. Sacks, and many people on Taiwan “would be willing to fight and die to protect that democracy.”

Taiwan has roughly doubled its defense budget over the past decade, and increased military conscription to one year. It is also stockpiling food, energy, and other supplies. Since his inauguration as president in May, Mr. Lai has launched an initiative to strengthen Taiwan’s resilience in national defense, disaster prevention, and democracy.

Mr. Lai responded to last week’s PLA exercise by pledging to beef up Taiwan’s coast guard with 11 new ships over the next seven years, according to CNN.

“Taiwan’s investment in societal resilience decreases the probability that China can mount a successful blockade,” says Mr. Thompson, a former director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. Defense Department.

The U.S. and its allies are working together with Taiwan to counter China’s growing military assertiveness with stronger deterrence. On Sunday, U.S. and Canadian warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait in a patrol aimed at upholding freedom of navigation in the strategic waterway, a conduit for a fifth of global trade in 2022.

This is one of three articles from Sudan that we are publishing this week, highlighting that country’s travails and citizens’ efforts to overcome them. Read the second one here.

For me, the most terrifying day of Sudan’s civil war was not the day that a missile came whistling through the sky as I took a walk with my 11-month-old son, slamming into a building two blocks away. It was not when my neighbor’s scream ripped open the silence of the night, and I found him dying in his house after being attacked by thieves. 

No, the most afraid I have been since war broke out in my country was on June 6, the day my daughter was born. 

That morning, my wife was scheduled for a cesarean section at one of the few hospitals still operating in Khartoum, the capital city. We had to leave our car behind in May of 2023 when we fled our neighborhood as it was being taken over by paramilitaries, so we rode to the hospital in a dented tuk-tuk. I squeezed her hand nervously as we passed the shells of countless burnt cars and abandoned homes, their doors flung open and squeaking on their hinges. There were few people on the streets, and most of them were soldiers.

When we reached the hospital, the doctor handed me a list of supplies needed for the surgery, including pain medications and bedsheets. “You’ll need to find these yourself,” she said apologetically. 

The shelves of the tiny hospital pharmacy were mostly bare, so before I knew it, I was back in the tuk-tuk. Every few blocks, my driver and I encountered a blocked-off section of road. Soldiers with machine guns slung over their shoulders, often dressed in jeans and T-shirts, asked for my ID and demanded to know where I was going. 

When I got back to the hospital almost an hour later, my nerves were frayed, but I thought that the worst was over.

In fact, it was only just beginning. 

Guy Peterson

A heavily pregnant woman prepares to give birth in a Sudanese maternity ward, June 14, 2024.

Born into conflict 

About 1.3 million babies will be born in Sudan this year, according to UNICEF. And each one will take their first breaths in a beautiful but broken land.

That is because, since April 2023, my country has been at war with itself. The conflict began as a power struggle between two generals, each backed by his own military force. On one side are Sudan’s armed forces. On the other is a powerful paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces. 

And in the middle are the Sudanese. Since the fighting began, more than 10 million people – 1 in every 5 Sudanese – have been forced to flee their homes. I am one of them. In fact, more people are displaced inside Sudan than in any other country. More than half of us don’t have enough to eat, and tens of thousands of people have died. 

So when my wife became pregnant last year, we were thrilled – but also terrified.

Even before the war, Sudan was a dangerous place to be a pregnant woman, with one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. Since the war began, things have gotten much worse. 

The World Health Organization has verified 88 attacks on Sudanese health care facilities since April 2023. These attacks have been perpetrated by both sides, and the purpose is often to prevent hospitals and clinics from caring for “enemy” combatants. This has led many facilities to shut down completely, or vastly reduce their operations. 

“We are here because of our work,” our doctor told us, “but the sad part is that each side of this conflict thinks we’re collaborating with the other.”

A recent study in the medical journal PeerJ found that most pregnant women in Khartoum have no access to medical care of any kind. Meanwhile, the handful of hospitals still managing to operate witness tragedies every single day.

One of my wife’s nurses told us stories that we could not forget. 

There was the set of premature quadruplets she delivered safely, only for them to die one by one after power cuts to the hospital shut off critical machines in the neonatal intensive care unit. 

In another instance, she watched a woman’s husband walk out on her when he heard that her emergency C-section would cost about $600, a far higher price than before the war, and a nearly unthinkable sum for many Sudanese. 

As my wife’s due date neared, we became consumed with fear. Would we be able to get to a hospital in time? Even if we did, would the hospital have electricity, or the supplies to bring our baby girl into the world? 

“A reason to keep going” 

While the nurses hovered over my wife during her C-section, all I could do was pray that my family would not become another of their cautionary tales. 

“We are out of the good-quality thread,” the doctor said apologetically after she finished the procedure and prepared to stitch the incision shut. 

On the other side of the room, my tiny newborn girl was barely crying. I held my breath as I stared at her dark-blue limbs. Suddenly, the nurse whisked her away.

“This is the only oxygen in the hospital,” the nurse said as she fitted a tiny mask on my daughter’s face. As the color returned to her limbs, I finally started to breathe again. 

Soon, the hospital turned off its generator for the night, leaving us in total darkness and suffocating heat. For hours, I fanned my wife and baby with a piece of cardboard torn from a medical supplies box as I listened to bursts of gunfire from the checkpoint outside our window. 

By the time the sun rose the next morning, I was ragged with exhaustion. But I couldn’t help but feel I had been part of a miracle. 

In the midst of so much fear and mistrust, people around the city had rushed to aid us – from the pharmacists who searched high and low for the supplies we needed, to the tuk-tuk driver who bravely navigated us through the hollowed-out city. In a time of so much death, they had risked their own safety to help a new life begin.

I didn’t take any of that lightly. When I looked into my daughter’s eyes, I knew that whatever happened next, I now had a reason to keep going. 

The Sudanese journalist who authored this piece requested anonymity for security reasons. This article was published in collaboration with Egab.

Part 2: ‘They are our people’: How community kitchens are piecing Sudan back together

Evacuation leaflets. Bombs. Displacement camps. Destroyed buildings and dead civilians.

As Israel pursues its military offensive in Lebanon, including strikes in Beirut, the parallels in Gaza are everywhere, generating an outpouring of solidarity from Palestinian residents of the besieged enclave.

From family to friends to places of birth, the ties binding Gazans to Lebanon are strong. Now they’re even more so, in a war in which Gaza residents see Israel repeating the tactics it used on the strip – targeting villages and densely populated neighborhoods – as it aims to uproot Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar late last week reverberated across the region and raised hopes in some quarters that an obstacle to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire had been lifted. But Israel has only stepped up a fierce ground and air assault on northern Gaza, and, with the region still anticipating an Israeli retaliatory strike against Iran, cease-fire talks remain moribund.

That has amplified Gaza Palestinians’ worries that the war in Lebanon and the prospect of a wider Israel-Iran conflict is pushing the plight of Gaza out of the headlines and out of mind for policymakers.

The war in Lebanon is personal for Osama Harb, who was born and raised in the Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut. His brother, two sisters, nieces, and nephews still live in the country.

Mr. Harb has called Gaza home since Israel exiled him from Lebanon to the strip in the 1980s, following the 1982 war.

He and many here who have lived in Lebanese refugee camps have family both in the strip and in Lebanon, and are following war updates from relatives in Lebanon while navigating missile strikes and Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza.

Bilal Hussein/AP

Families carry their belongings in Beirut's Martyrs' Square after fleeing Israeli airstrikes in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, Sept. 28, 2024.

“We have a WhatsApp group where everyone updates each other on their status,” Mr. Harb says from a rented shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

His brother, Mustapha, who lives in the Beddawi refugee camp in northern Lebanon, told him, “We have lived for a few minutes what you have been experiencing for a year.”

“No one can truly understand what it’s like to live under bombardment except for someone who has experienced it firsthand,” notes Mr. Harb.

Another similarity between the conflict zones: the dropping of leaflets by the Israeli army ordering residents to evacuate or face bombing.

According to the United Nations, more than one-fourth of Lebanon’s population has been placed under Israeli military evacuation orders and more than 750,000 Lebanese have been displaced by the fighting. One year into the Israel-Hamas war, the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents has been displaced multiple times.

“I remember when they first dropped leaflets over Gaza asking people to evacuate,” says Mr. Harb. “Whenever we hear about an evacuation, we pack our bags and flee to safer locations, just as the Lebanese are doing now.”

“It is the same as here”

For the few Gazans able to leave the Israel-besieged strip prior to the war, Lebanon was an oasis, and a hub of academic and cultural activity.

Heba Alsaidi, a displaced researcher and translator sheltering in Deir al-Balah, had completed an undergraduate degree in English literature studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut through a U.S. State Department-funded leadership program. She, like many Palestinians in Gaza, called Lebanon home.

“Israel destroyed Gaza. Why must Israel destroy my second home?” Ms. Alsaidi says.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Heba Alsaidi, who studied in Lebanon, spends her days texting with 15 close friends back in Beirut, in Deir al-Balah, in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 12, 2024.

After a year of receiving messages of support and sympathetic ears from friends in Lebanon throughout the war in Gaza, Ms. Alsaidi is now providing support to them. She spends her days texting with 15 close friends back in Beirut as they navigate missile strikes that have already claimed the lives of 2,300 people.

“It is the same as here,” she says. “The same method: Evacuations. Relentless bombing. Uncertainty. It is war.”

Ms. Alsaidi can’t escape the parallel images of evacuee tents in Beirut’s Instagrammable coastline spots and the tent cities that have grown along “our once beautiful beaches” on Gaza’s coast, like in the Mawasi region.

But there is one crucial difference between Israel’s wars in Gaza and in Lebanon that is not lost on Palestinians here: Lebanese have the option to escape.

Even residents of Gaza with thousands of dollars of cash on hand, who previously could exit through Rafah in a complicated and costly Egyptian-permit process, no longer have that option since Israel’s military offensive and takeover of the Rafah crossing in May.

“The silver lining in Lebanon is that people have the chance to evacuate to other countries without paying exorbitant fees or bribes. The borders remain open,” Ms. Alsaidi says. “While the situation is similar, the circumstances look different.”

Gazans forgotten?

The dropoff in media attention in Gaza “deepens our sense of isolation,” says Aya al-Wakeel, a lawyer and human rights advocate who left Gaza for Egypt to seek medical attention for family members prior to Israel’s closing of Rafah.

“The lack of attention reiterates how alone we truly are in this struggle, amplifying our feelings of despair and helplessness,” says Ms. Wakeel. “There’s little action from the international community. It’s as if we are on a different planet.”

It comes as Israel intensifies its strikes and siege on northern Gaza, where international aid groups say some 400,000 people are trapped, and continues deadly strikes across the strip.

Ghada Abdulfattah

The displacement camp that sisters Kenda and Aseel al-Atawai now call home is in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2024.

In northern Gaza, aid and food deliveries have been severely limited since Oct. 2, and Israel has stopped permission for the Jordan-led, United States-supported aid drops, deepening starvation. Last week the United Nations’ undersecretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs raised the alarm of “dwindling” food stocks, noting that there was “barely any food left to distribute.”

And strikes continue, with the U.N. reporting more than 400 Palestinians in Gaza killed in multiple mass casualty Israeli airstrikes in the last week alone. Gaza health authorities say 87 people were killed in a single strike in Beit Lahia on Saturday.

In one graphic strike last week on an evacuee center near Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital, 20 people were killed, including civilians and patients who were burned alive as other evacuees and neighbors were helpless and unable to save them.

Yet such stories, Gaza residents note, are barely being heard or seen beyond their social media feeds.

Ms. Alsaidi, the translator, notes that “News from Lebanon is overshadowing the stories from Gaza.”

“Now we are truly forgotten because all the news has shifted its focus on Lebanon,” Kenda al-Atawai, a student studying to become a speech therapist, says from her family’s tent in a displacement encampment in Deir al-Balah. “They’ve completely overlooked us. This is a problem in and of itself.”

“We’ve been living in hell for so long, and now it feels like we are invisible. Nobody even mentions us.”

Her sister, Aseel, agrees.

“When I watch the news, I see networks divide their screen into six panels of correspondents, and none of them are talking about Gaza,” she says.

“It is heartbreaking.”

AP

Cattle walk along an illegally deforested area in a reserve in Rondonia state, Brazil, last year.

In early October, a group of public organizations and private funders backed a novel strategy to slow deforestation in the Amazon basin. It plans to provide financial incentives for cattle ranchers in Colombia to restore degraded pasturelands in the world’s largest rainforest.

The ranchers, in other words, would be on the front line in mitigating climate change, joining many of the world’s rural areas in a shift in values on land use.

“We can choose our values, and how to live with them,” Marília Moura, a spokesperson for one of many farming collectives across rural Portugal formed in response to climate change, told The Christian Science Monitor.

By some estimates, the world requires $2.4 trillion a year to address global warming. That need is driving innovations in climate finance. Each year, dozens of new funding tools emerge to help businesses and communities adapt to climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

“It used to be ecology versus economics,” Portuguese farmer Pipo Vieira told the Monitor. “Now people realize it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of ... exploiting nature, we can live differently.”

In Colombia, cattle ranching occupies 80% of agricultural land, employing more than 800,000 people. Since the signing of a peace accord in 2016 that ended a half-century of conflict between the government and a guerrilla group, a few projects have shown how restoring farming communities and surrounding ecosystems can lead to economic renewal.

The new finance model is one of 10 pilot projects endorsed by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance. It brings together investors and cattle ranchers in potentially lasting partnerships. Instead of saddling farming families with debt, the investments are based on deferred profit-sharing after five years.

Many countries are expanding their thinking on what is possible with the climate challenge. In the Caribbean, for example, people need a “cultural confidence,” said Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, in a 2020 speech, “that plays to our strengths and which captures the imagination of our own people” in response to the region’s problems, such as vulnerability to natural disasters.