Methodology & Data Sources
This site tracks daily PLA military activity around Taiwan. Every figure is transcribed verbatim from the daily public releases of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Ministry of National Defense (MND) — nothing is estimated or inferred.
Source & updates
- Single source: the ROC MND "Real-time Military Activity" bulletins and their flight-path graphics. This site only transcribes, structures and visualizes that data; nothing unconfirmed by the MND is added.
- Fetched automatically once a day after the MND publishes around midday Taiwan time (≈ 12:00–14:00), with backup retry runs.
- If the MND does not publish on a given day, that day stays blank — never filled with an estimate. Records are append-only and never rewritten, so cited figures stay stable.
- Checked before writing: median-line crossings may not exceed total sorties; the crossing rate must match the computed value (±1%); no duplicate dates; aircraft-type values must be valid. Pages are not regenerated unless the checks pass.
Lines & terms
An informal line down the centre of the strait, never recognized by any treaty between the two sides. For decades aircraft and vessels largely refrained from crossing it, so a crossing is a strong political and military signal — but crossing it does not constitute a violation of territory or sovereign airspace under international law and does not trigger the right of self-defense. "Median-line crossings" here means the PLA sorties that crossed this line that day.
Under UNCLOS, the 12 nautical miles from the baseline are a state's territorial sea and the airspace above it is sovereign airspace — the boundary that actually carries legal weight. Once PLA aircraft or vessels come inside this line, Taiwan may take defensive action under international law and its Defense Act. A different order of event from a median-line crossing.
Declared for the early identification of airborne objects, and far larger than sovereign airspace. Entering an ADIZ is not a violation of sovereignty; it is used to gauge intensity.
"Sorties" is the number of PLA aircraft missions detected that day, per the MND's own count; "vessels" is the number of PLA Navy ships detected that day. Other activity such as surveillance balloons is noted in the notes column of the daily records.
The arms dataset
The Arms Delivery Tracker is a separate dataset covering US Foreign Military Sales to Taiwan notified to Congress by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) since 2019. A DSCA notification is the congressional-notification stage only: it is not a signed contract and not a delivery, and notified values are ceilings that signed amounts often fall below. Direct commercial sales and US-forces transfers are excluded; every case is compiled by hand and carries its own source link.
Citation & license
The underlying figures are public information from the MND. This site's compilation, field structure and charts are released under CC BY 4.0. Please credit:
Source: ROC Ministry of National Defense; compilation & charts: PLA Activity Tracker (https://pla-tracker.pages.dev).
- Raw data (CSV): https://pla-tracker.pages.dev/data/records.csv
- Related posts: Blog