China launched two days of live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait on Thursday, July 23, while a separate but related episode of Chinese naval activity in the western Pacific has drawn a formal protest from Japan, highlighting a pattern of expanding Chinese military operations across the region.

The Taiwan Strait drills, scheduled to run from 6 am to 6 pm each day, are concentrated around Dongshan Island, near China's southeastern province of Fujian, which borders Guangdong. Maritime authorities issued advance notices of the exercises, which involve live ammunition. The announcement came one day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting in Manila, where Taiwan — a democratically governed island that China claims as its own territory — was among the issues discussed. China's most extensive recent show of force around Taiwan came in December, when its Eastern Theatre Command launched rockets into waters north and south of the island following a US arms package worth a record $11.1 billion.

Separately, Japan's Ministry of Defense revealed on July 21 that a Chinese guided-missile destroyer, the Kaifeng, had conducted a machine-gun firing exercise on July 19 approximately 180 kilometres southwest of Okinotorishima — a remote Japanese-claimed outpost in the Pacific — placing it squarely within waters Tokyo considers its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The exercise was conducted alongside Russian frigate Rezkiy, part of a joint patrol following the two navies'