China has strung more than 50 warships and official vessels along the island arc from southern Japan to the Philippines, and Taiwan wants everyone to see them.

Joseph Wu, secretary-general of Taiwan's National Security Council, posted a map on X on October 28 plotting 53 Chinese ships, 34 of them navy warships. The aircraft carrier Liaoning and its battle group sat east of the Philippines, other formations lay off Taiwan's east and southeast coasts and three more were marked off southern Japan, Reuters reported.

"The simultaneous threat to Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines is obvious," Wu said. "We are staying vigilant about their activities."

Taipei is publishing the positions of Chinese warships and coast guard ships more often, and Wu put out a similar map in May. By drawing Japan and the Philippines into the same frame, he presented Beijing's pressure as a problem for the whole First Island Chain rather than a quarrel across the Taiwan Strait, and invited Tokyo and Manila to read it that way.

Japan's defence ministry tracked three Chinese warships and a coast guard ship through the Osumi Strait off Kyushu and into the Pacific on October 27. The Philippine military followed the Liaoning group off the country's south in the days before ASEAN defence ministers gathered in Cebu. Beijing's defence ministry has called the carrier's deployment routine training aimed at no particular country.

"We are not happy to see any attempt to project deterrence that could undermine peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region," Defence Minister Wellington Koo told reporters at the legislature on October 29. A senior security official said the next signal would be the carrier's heading after its drills in the Philippine Sea. "If it keeps moving north, that would suggest a stronger intent to put pressure on Japan's defence posture," the official said.

Beijing has spent the year tightening export curbs on Japanese defence firms over Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's support for Taiwan, and the naval traffic through the Osumi Strait brings that quarrel to Japan's own coast.

US Army Pacific is posturing the theatre on the assumption that China will have the capacity, and possibly the intent, to take Taiwan by force next year, its commander, General Ronald Clark, told the TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu on October 27, Stars and Stripes reported. The "Davidson window", named after the admiral who told the US Senate in 2021 that China was on course for that capability by 2027, is "still valid", he said.

Clark called the window "a period of time for which we're snapping the chalk line to say we need to be ready by this date." Under his Army Ready Forward approach, equipment, materiel and personnel rotate through positions west of the international date line, on the island chains nearest China.

US intelligence is less certain of the date. "Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027, nor do they have a fixed timeline for achieving unification," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its annual threat assessment in March.

In Cebu, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth used an informal meeting with ASEAN ministers on October 28 to suggest "that we work together to develop a US-ASEAN framework for defense cooperation", tied to the 50th anniversary of formal ties in 2027. He named maritime domain awareness, interoperability and closer work between navies as priorities, and said Washington would start on the details with Singapore, which takes over the chair from Manila. "We're not going to agree on everything, nor do we need to," he said, according to GMA News.

Hegseth was more concrete with his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro, telling him the same day that the US would raise security cooperation funding for the Philippine armed forces, though he gave no sum.

Manila meanwhile, would have liked clearer language on the South China Sea or on the 1951 Mutual Defence Treaty, Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told The Hill. "For the Philippines, the whole ASEAN chair year has been a difficult balance," he had told Reuters as the talks opened.

Beijing sent only its defence attaché in Manila to the wider ADMM-Plus session on October 29, and its defence ministry accused the Philippines of obstructing Chinese attendance. Talks on a South China Sea code of conduct remain stalled, and Chinese and Philippine warships faced off near Scarborough Shoal as recently as June.