Haley Zaremba
Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the…
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By Haley Zaremba – Sep 05, 2025, 6:00 PM CDT
- China’s state-owned CNOOC has installed vessels and drilling platforms inside Taiwan’s EEZ, marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s gray-zone tactics.
- Taiwan, now nearly 100% reliant on imported energy after shutting its last nuclear plant in May 2025, is highly vulnerable to Chinese coercion and blockades.
- Wargames by U.S. think tanks show Taiwan would run out of natural gas within 10 days under a blockade, highlighting the strategic risk of China’s offshore drilling push.
China is now illegally drilling for oil within Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone, ramping up Beijing’s campaign of aggression against the island’s sovereignty. Over the past several years, China has been intensifying performative military displays in the waters around the island, but drilling within Taiwan’s territory is a new development that could signal a new, ultra-aggressive political era for the One China policy.
Over the last two months, “at least 12 oil and gas vessels and permanent structures were detected inside Taiwan’s [exclusive economic zone] – including one within 50km of the restricted-waters border of the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands – as well as several steel supports for fixed offshore drilling platforms, called jackets,” reports the Guardian. This infrastructure belongs to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of the world’s largest oil and gas outfits.
A report from the Washington-based think tank the Jamestown Foundation warns that this newly installed equipment could serve as the means for “a full range of coercion, blockade, bombardment and/or invasion scenarios” on the part of China against Pratas or Taiwan.
This newest tactic marks a notable intensification of what experts refer to as China’s “gray-zone” warfare strategy in the waters around Taiwan. “Gray-zone” tactics refer to China’s pattern of ramping up conflict and pushing boundaries with Taiwan for its own strategic benefit without escalating to actual fighting. Over the past several years, China has been increasingly challenging the status quo in the Taiwan Straight, as a means of repeatedly “contesting Taipei and its allies’ readiness to respond to crises, and actively testing the boundaries of state coercive behavior below the threshold of a conventional confrontation,” according to an analysis from the Global Taiwan Institute.
China contends that Taiwan – recognized as a sovereign nation by most global governing bodies – belongs to China as a part of the nation’s One China policy, which seeks to reclaim territories that the Chinese believe have wrongfully defected. China also lays claim to the entirety of the South China Sea, even though international courts in The Hague have ruled against this assertion, and in reality, six countries – China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines,