Written By Meng Kit Tang.
Image credit: provided by the author.
When the Script Disappears
On 5 August, Taiwan’s armed forces began the forty-second iteration of an exercise old enough that most soldiers training for it were born after it started. Han Kuang 42 ran for ten days, mobilised more than twenty thousand reservists, and did something none of the previous forty-one had done: it withheld the script.
For four decades, officers rehearsed a known sequence of events. This year they did not know what was coming, and in a narrower, more literal sense, neither did President Lai Ching-te, who on the exercise’s first night was driven by an armoured convoy from the Presidential Office to the Hengshan command post in Taipei’s Dazhi district, the military testing whether the machinery of government could keep functioning if he could not reach it.
A mock version of the building Lai left that night has stood at China’s Zhurihe training base in Inner Mongolia since 2015. Zhurihe now includes a replica Judicial Yuan as well, linked to the mock Presidential Office by an underground tunnel close to three hundred metres long, identified in satellite imagery the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals (JINF) published in October 2025. The complex has grown roughly threefold since 2020.
A second, separate mock-up of Taipei’s government district has also been identified elsewhere in Inner Mongolia. This piece focuses on Zhurihe, where the sourcing is strongest, but the scale of what China has built runs wider than one complex.
Set side by side, these developments point to a narrower judgment. Both sides appear to be preparing for the opening hours of a conflict, when political and military decisions may matter most. Neither program appears to be a direct response to the other. They reflect a similar concern reached independently: what happens in the first hours of a crisis.
Keeping the System Alive
Officers received no pre-distributed scenario, continuing a shift that began three exercises earlier. Two reserve brigades, based in the north and south, were mobilised as a live test of whether Taiwan can generate the five thousand additional bodies a brigade-scale call-up requires, not merely whether the paperwork exists to do it.
For the first time, the exercise was paired with a thirty-minute mobile network slowdown in parts of the country, testing whether local government and the public, not only soldiers, could function when communications degrade. And the drill that put Lai in an armoured vehicle rather than a briefing room, the Wan Jun Plan, has long existed; what changed is that his government now publicises it, naming continuity of government as the object being tested.
Building the Target
The Zhurihe complex reveals a different priority through architecture rather than doctrine. Chinese state television broadcast troops assaulting the mock Presidential Office as early as 2015.
Since then, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has added structures resembling Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Defence, and, most recently, the Judicial Yuan mock-up and its connecting tunnel, identified in a 1 October 2025 analysis published through Sankei Shimbun. The message was direct: Taiwan could build all the escape routes it wanted and still find no way out.
Where Taiwan is rehearsing the capacity to keep governing under disruption, China is rehearsing the physical seizure of the buildings from which that governing happens. The complex reduces Taipei’s political core to a known layout and a known distance between targets, connected now by a tunnel that turns two separate assaults into one continuous one.
The Race for the First Hour
Both programs share a centre of gravity: control of the earliest phase of political and military decision-making before either side’s broader war-fighting capacity comes into play at all. But the resemblance stops at the level of method.
Taiwan’s preparation is public by design, announced days in advance with reservists called up on public notice, covered by named spokespeople, a signal in its own right. China’s is cumulative and quiet, built over a decade through incremental construction that only became visible through foreign satellite analysis. One side is demonstrating; the other is building.
Both preparations unfold beneath a layer of routine pressure that neither government treats as a trigger in itself. And both operate on institutional clocks that never quite align.
Han Kuang runs on an annual validation cycle nested inside an active reform process, each iteration adjusted against the lessons of the one before. Zhurihe’s expansion has proceeded on a builder’s timeline, additions arriving roughly annually since 2020 with no evident year-to-year link to what Taiwan’s exercises are doing.
The absence of synchrony suggests two institutions solving the same problem on their own schedules, not one answering the other’s moves.
There is one place where the two programs pull against each other directly. Taiwan’s continuity measures are partly an attempt to buy enough time for outside actors to matter; China’s node-focused training is partly an attempt to compress that same window before any outside actor can.
An underground tunnel designed to move troops between two mock buildings in minutes, and a reserve system tested this year through the mobilisation of two brigade-level units, are arguments about the same thing: time. One side is trying to shorten it. The other is trying to preserve it. The comparison here is between Taiwan and China, not a trilateral contest.
China’s investment suggests an effort to make forcing a political outcome easier, although the construction alone cannot reveal its exact purpose. Taiwan, by contrast, is trying to make an early, paralysing strike harder to execute. It faces constraints China does not. Taiwan cannot move its geography, easily relocate its population, or choose when a crisis begins. China has greater freedom over all three.
Both sides are investing in the same basic idea: that the first hours of a crisis could shape its outcome. In China’s case, years of quiet preparation suggest this is becoming institutionalised rather than remaining contingency planning.
What the Evidence Cannot Tell Us
Neither program has been tested by conditions resembling the ones it is meant to survive. Taiwan’s unscripted format is closer to friction than the old, scripted version, but it is still an exercise, run by soldiers who know, at some level, that the stakes are simulated. Zhurihe’s replicas allow for realistic rehearsal of assault tactics against a known layout, but a layout copied from satellite imagery of Taipei’s Bo’ai district is not the actual district with its actual population, actual traffic, and actual improvised resistance.
The two programs are also supported by very different kinds of evidence. That matters. What we know about Han Kuang comes from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence and Presidential Office. The information is official and on the record, but it is also shaped by what Taipei wants observers to see. The evidence on Zhurihe is more indirect. It comes from satellite imagery analysed by a Tokyo-based think tank, first reported by a Japanese newspaper and then repeated by other media. There has been no independent corroboration and no confirmation from Beijing.
Satellite imagery can show that a structure exists and what it resembles. It cannot, by itself, show the doctrine or scenario the PLA intends to use it for. The imagery therefore tells us more about capability and preparation than about confirmed doctrine.
There is also another plausible interpretation. Hung Tzu-chieh, an analyst at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defence and Security Research (INDSR), has argued that the replicas may primarily support realistic urban-combat training. Taipei, in this reading, is simply the most plausible battlefield for such training. The replicas do not by themselves prove that leadership decapitation is the objective.
The more alarming interpretation remains possible. The specificity of the replicas, particularly the tunnel connecting the buildings, makes it difficult to dismiss. But the available evidence does not establish that decapitation is the PLA’s primary purpose. What it establishes is narrower: the PLA has built structures that allow it to rehearse combat against a physical representation of Taiwan’s political and military infrastructure.
The Hour That Cannot Be Rehearsed
This is not a conventional arms race, and it is not simply signalling. It is two institutions, working under an unresolved question of sovereignty, preparing for the same problem in very different ways: what happens in the opening phase of a conflict, when political and military decisions may have to be made before the wider war has even begun.
The tunnel under Zhurihe has never carried a soldier under real fire. No one outside the PLA can say with certainty what it was built to prove. The officers who ran Han Kuang 42 without a script have never had to improvise against an enemy that meant it. China has spent years building a physical rehearsal of the problem. Taiwan has spent years preparing to keep its system functioning when that problem arrives. Neither side knows whether its rehearsal will survive the real test.
Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. He is also a regular contributor to Taiwan Insight.