Inside Taiwan's machine gun classes preparing for war with China

Telegraph

09-07-2025

Classes at the Jushing Primary School in Taiwan's Miaoli county were very different on Wednesday.
Next door to five-year-olds learning their ABCs and 1-2-3s, reservist soldiers in full combat gear were learning how to accurately fire machine guns at Chinese invaders.
Taiwan's largest annual military drills, known as the Han Kuang exercises, will see a record 22,000 reserve soldiers putting on their military uniforms and reporting to gyms, recreational centres, and schools across the island.
This year's drills are expected to be the biggest and longest-running to date, and will simulate how the country could respond in the event of an attack by China, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory and has threatened to use force to 'reunify' the island.
The Telegraph visited a primary school in Miaoli, 60 miles south of the capital Taipei, where around 70 reserve soldiers assembled, loaded and aimed firearms, including 65K2 rifles, M249 squad machine guns and T74 platoon machine guns.
'This is to allow these personnel to maintain a certain level of proficiency in firearms so that they can quickly recover their combat effectiveness when war breaks out,' Colonel Cheng Tzu-Cheng, the chief of staff of the 302nd Infantry Brigade, which is running the training, told The Telegraph.
The brigade has taken over the primary school for its drills, divvying up the space for different training purposes – all the while a daycare runs as normal in one of the ground-floor rooms.
In the upstairs hallway, the reservists take turns practicing how to disassemble and reassemble the M249 machine gun, while in the downstairs gym it's all about precision shooting, as soldiers crawl along the ground, crouch behind large wooden cut-outs, and aim at makeshift targets on the wall.
Most of these reservists are ordinary civilians, and part of the goal of the Han Kuang exercise is to measure how quickly and effectively they can switch to military mode.
The size of their task is clear.
Taiwan, a country of 23 million people, has 180,000 soldiers and as many as 1.67 million reservists. China, with its population of 1.4 billion, has more than two million active soldiers and 1.2 million reservists.
On Wednesday, under the intense stare of brigade commanders and the flashbulbs of cameras from the assembled media, some reservists were taking longer to acclimatise than others, with gun parts fumbled and dropped onto the floor.
Colonel Cheng explained that the first day involves 'basic' practice, then 'it will progress to combat and tactical movements' before the reservists take part in field exercises as the final part of the drills.
The early training will also focus on countering China's 'grey zone' pressure, which describes activity that falls short of open warfare, but aims to coerce Taiwan ahead of a possible attack.
This activity has included cyber attacks, intrusions of ships and aircraft into Taiwan's airspace and damage to the undersea cables, which supply most of the island with its internet.
To practice defending Taiwan against these efforts, the exercises also included simulations of Chinese militia boats and Coast Guard vessels sailing near the island, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence.
Some of Taiwan's most sophisticated technology will also be on display over the next ten days, including the US-supplied Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars), TOW 2B anti-tank missiles, new unmanned aviation vehicles (UAVs), and a domestically built version of the Sky Sword II missile.
But China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) significantly exceeds Taiwan across every metric. China has more than six times the number of tanks and aircraft than Taiwan, and nearly five times more artillery.
War game simulations have shown that if Taiwan is forced to face Beijing alone, or if the country surrenders before the United States is able to assist, it would be overwhelmed in a very short time.
Given China's increasing aggression around Taiwan, portions of Han Kuang exercises will also reportedly be 'unscripted' for the first time this year to test soldiers' response to unexpected attacks.
This year's drills will also include urban resilience preparedness drills, which have been a focus of the current government.
Barely a month after he was elected, Lai Ching-te, the president of Taiwan, established a committee to bring in civilian experts from fields like transportation, healthcare and energy to develop a more holistic response to a potential Chinese invasion and combat ongoing grey-zone intrusions.
As part of the urban resilience drills, mobile phones will receive alerts about incoming attacks, and air raid sirens will blare out across cities.
China appears to be unimpressed so far, but they are keeping a close watch on the activities.
On Wednesday, 31 PLA aircraft and seven vessels were detected around the island.
Jiang Bin, spokesman for China's Ministry of National Defence, called the exercises 'nothing but a bluffing and self-deceiving trick' and said it doesn't matter what weapons Taiwan deploys, as 'the overwhelming and irresistible trend of China's national reunification will not be stopped'.
China also announced on Wednesday that it would be placing export controls on eight Taiwanese companies, which it claims are involved in the shipment of dual-use technologies.
The live-fire Han Kuang drills follow two weeks of computerised, table-top exercises that were held in April using the United States-built Joint Theatre Level Simulation (JTLS) platform.