Written by Tom Wilson.
Image credit: provided by the author.
In the heat and dust of Douliu township, the Yunlin Road McDonald’s is an oasis of cool air. I was waiting for breakfast inside when every cellphone in the restaurant buzzed and showed a message: an evacuation drill is being held across Yunlin County. Stay calm and follow instructions to move to the nearest assembly point.
Every customer put their phone down and continued eating.
This was why I was in Yunlin. The urban resilience exercises were being held over four months across Taiwan – a key part of President Lai Ching-te’s whole-of-society approach to planning for military contingencies and natural disasters. This year’s exercises would be natural and unscripted, built around “real people, real objects, real locations, real scenarios, and real operations.”
I was attending as an independent observer because I wanted to see what this meant for people in towns like Douliu. I had written about the exercises a few months earlier. Taiwan’s whole-of-society resilience initiative had been widely reported on as an important deterrence mechanism against conflict with the People’s Republic of China. But I had heard little about how the relationships that it relies on were being understood and evaluated.
The importance of such relationships was underlined in a 2020 study of Yilan’s Meizhou township. It found that ‘social capital’ – the trust built between residents, communities, and institutions – had been key to Meizhou’s resilience in the face of repeated flooding. I had seen similar patterns while working in New Zealand’s Public Service.
When I called Yunlin’s county office to confirm details of the exercise, the first official I spoke to seemed bemused. I explained that I was interested in seeing how public agencies were working with community groups and NGOs. “But there won’t really be much of that,” she said. “They’ll… mostly be practising their routines.”
I said that would be fine. I wanted to understand what the exercises were actually measuring.
I arrived at the Douliu City Office at 9.30 in the morning and was ushered to the Emergency Operations Centre. The room was hushed; around 25 people crowded around a board table. Almost all were studying their phones.
A woman holding a clipboard motioned for me to sit with her. She frowned and asked if I had been given the day’s schedule. She brought it up on her phone screen so I could take a photograph. It took me a moment to realise this wasn’t a schedule for what was happening here. It was the itinerary for the county representatives who were evaluating different sites across Yunlin.
The commanding officer ended a call and greeted me. He named people around the room. Fire and emergency, police, city officials, Taipower, water utilities. He asked what I was interested in seeing. When I said I wanted to see how civil society groups were being involved, he paused. Perhaps it would be better to move to the ‘coordination centre’ next door, he said.
So I did. A screen by the entrance looped a video of Chang Li-shan, Yunlin’s county magistrate, demonstrating how to prepare an emergency bag. Around 20 people sat around tables in fluorescent vests: city officials, volunteers, service corps members. They chatted within their groups, switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese.
What were these people responsible for? I asked a nearby organiser.
They were waiting for orders to coordinate other groups across Yunlin, she explained. She used the word 待命. I would hear it many times today.
Whose orders were they waiting on?
She gestured back to the operations centre.
Was today’s exercise testing a particular scenario? I asked.
No, she explained. It’s more about simulating reporting procedures.
I asked myself where the coordination was in this room right now.
The answer seemed to be: it was sitting in front of me, waiting for authority to act.
We waited for over an hour. Two volunteers fell asleep.
Another organiser gave me a different answer about the day’s scenario. In the morning, she said, they were briefed that a military invasion had begun the day before.
I asked if the coordination centre here would continue past today.
She seemed surprised by the question. No, it probably wouldn’t, she said. It had been created for the exercise.
At 12 o’clock, we broke for lunch. I was given a packed meal too.
The commanding officer waved me into his office. He called in a woman I recognised from earlier in the morning.
I ate, and she spoke – sometimes fast enough that I had to repeat her Mandarin back to confirm. Her role was to relay information between the operations room and other sites.
Did people in that room already know each other? I asked.
Before answering, she opened LINE on her cellphone. She was part of multiple group chats connected to this work, she explained. One of those included most of the people I had seen in the operations centre. They had used the group for years, she said, to circulate official notices.
Another LINE group connected the same people with around 40 neighbourhood chiefs (里長) across Yunlin. This group spent a lot of time responding to power grid issues, she said.
In a third, the neighbourhood chiefs shared reports of damaged roads, traffic lights, and water pipes. I said they must use that group fairly often. Yes, she laughed, it was used daily – even on weekends.
I remembered how, after the 2025 Matai’an floods, I had helped to deliver furniture around Tafalong village. People were worried that the river could flood a second time. When heavy rains hit again, I saw residents use LINE groups to assess risks and plan driving routes.
These were the channels that communities used to organise themselves every day. What was their place, I asked myself, in today’s exercises?
I asked my lunch companion how the afternoon might play out. She looked thoughtful. Things here would probably be on pause until the county representatives arrived, she said.
She added that the representatives could be strict. “If they even see us drinking bubble tea during the drill, they’ll tell us off.”
Lunch wound down. The officials had encouraged me to visit a relief station in the hospital next door, but the security guards outside were wary. It was a sensitive area, they said, not for outsiders. They suggested I visit two schools nearby: one a rationing centre, the other an emergency shelter.
I arrived at Zhenxi Elementary School at 2.15 in the afternoon. Bain-maries full of food sat in the courtyard outside. In the school hall, tables were stacked with boxes of oil, rice, salt, and milk powder. City officials waited beside them. Three middle-aged men watched from behind, the words “全民國防 / All-Out Defence” printed on their vests.
A television cameraman stood by the entrance. An older man rallied volunteers through a microphone. I recognised him as the neighbourhood chief responsible for the site. Elderly people streamed in and sat on plastic chairs. Two police officers stood beside us, holding guns.
The room grew noisier, then went silent. A woman and two men stepped inside, followed by officials with notepads. The woman was Chang Li-shan, the county magistrate I had seen in the video. This must be the moment the site had been building towards.
The neighbourhood chief welcomed them and explained how the site had been set up this morning. Chang asked questions about how ingredients were being stored. She explained how to prevent food spoilage and stressed the need to work with stores like PX Mart to keep food supplies secure.
As Chang spoke, elderly volunteers were ushered to the tables in front of her. They filled out paperwork, and city officials handed them boxes of rice and oil.
Then, suddenly, everything was over. The representatives left with the cameraman. The neighbourhood chief encouraged volunteers to take rations home. I stepped outside. The bain-maries were being packed away too. It looked like the clean-up of a wedding or a film set.
It was 3 o’clock. The exercises were meant to run until 5.
I arrived at Zhennan Elementary School just as the county representatives were leaving. The evacuation shelter was in the auditorium. Several tents stood in the middle, with Tzu-Chi Foundation’s logo on the sides. Tzu-Chi was Taiwan’s largest humanitarian NGO. It surprised me that I had not seen more of them today.
A city official told me they had practised their drills four times today. I asked what that involved. It simulated the evacuation process, she said: taking people’s details and directing them to shelter.
Were they responding to a specific scenario? I asked. She paused. The drills were about starting from scratch, she said: “從零開始.”
It was not the first time I had heard that phrase. Even across this year’s exercises, the approach was being continually iterated. The next round, in Nantou, would respond to a scenario involving a Chinese blockade, hijacked broadcasts, and an earthquake. The final rounds would be combined with the ‘Han Kuang 42’ military drill.
Government directives stressed that these exercises would focus on protecting infrastructure essential to daily life. I had come here to see how far that extended to the relationships that hold it together.
The question that stuck with me was: how would those involved decide what kinds of resilience were worth learning from today?
As I prepared to leave, I asked the city official what would happen next.
“Well, we’re cleaning up now.”
I meant after today’s evaluation – what would happen then?
She looked back at the desks lined up against the wall.
“The future exercises… will try to action that feedback.”
Tom Wilson is a public governance practitioner based in Taipei whose work focuses on democratic resilience in the Asia-Pacific. Previously, as a specialist advisor at New Zealand’s Public Service Commission, he led the design of new public institutions, including New Zealand’s first Ministry of Disabled People and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, and developed mechanisms for cross-government coordination and partnerships with NGOs and Māori organisations.