Jenny Huang is practicing cleaning water from the creek near her apartment in Linkou, northwest of Taipei. She pours the water through pantyhouse to filter out sediment, then coffee filters for smaller particles, and finally adds iodine to kill bacteria and any microorganisms in the water. The 48-year-old mother of one believes someday it might be a necessity. She doesn’t bother learning how to gather rainwater, she says, because it is too polluted in the city, but for the most part the creek water runs down from the mountains.
Huang’s preparations arose from her fear of military aggression from China cutting off her family’s access to basic necessities. Huang is part of a larger movement of “preppers” in Taiwan who store food, water, and other supplies in preparation for a potential blockade, or military aggression, from China. At the root of their urgency is Xi Jinping’s promise to develop the capacity to make the island part of the People’s Republic of China by 2027—by force if necessary.
Huang’s prepping grew out of her work as an activist. Following local Taiwan elections in 2018, she organized a coalition of Taiwanese mothers to voice opposition to unification with China and promote democracy in Taiwan. “Unifying with China is the worst thing I could imagine, as a mother of a child,” Huang says. “I wanted to do something to express my worries.”
“We started to write articles about how we, as common people and as mothers, want to protect our democracy,” Huang says. “We were doing this for two or three years, and from that, [we thought] just writing on Facebook is not enough. We need physical actions.”
Although the group decided they needed to arrange in-person training after the first few years of online activism, pandemic lockdowns delayed their plans.
Once Taiwan’s COVID-19 concerns eased in 2022, Huang and her peers began preparing in person. They gathered friends and neighbors and began training.
Initially, Huang’s Linkou Disaster Prevention Self-Training Group had only 10 members, mostly other moms she knew locally, but now her Facebook page has more than 700 followers. About 15 attend in-person training with the group on a regular basis.
“I encourage them to go to the different classes, civil defense courses . . . to get more knowledge from the different books and come back to our neighborhood and community to share their knowledge and we practice the skills together,” Huang says.
If her 12-year-old daughter doesn’t have school, Huang brings her along when she teaches first aid in other cities, as well as to the group’s strength training events. There, they practice sprinting, carrying and dragging weights, and personal self-defense, with a focus on how to get themselves and their families away from danger.
The Huangs’ cabinets are stocked with standard pain and cold medicine, bandages, disinfectants, tourniquets, and feminine hygiene supplies. They have canned meats and fish, dried vegetables and meat, and MREs—military rations—stored, enough to feed them for about a month. They also have a small trampoline and a Nintendo Switch to keep themselves entertained, as well as physical copies of Huang’s daughter’s school books, to prevent her education from being interrupted.
Huang isn’t alone. While it’s hard to know how many individuals across Taiwan are prepping as Huang is, military service is mandatory for males in Taiwan and “civil-defense” groups, volunteer organizations charged with coordinated responses to natural disasters and providing evacuation and shelter during wartime, saw a dramatic increase in the popularity of their training courses, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Such groups included more than 420,000 people in Taiwan that year, according to Taipei Times.
Forward Alliance, a civil defense group based in Taipei, offers courses on everything from survival, search and rescue, shelter management, and how to tie a tourniquet, to “disaster psychology” and leadership and teamwork. “We work with community organizations to ensure they can mobilize and respond to all types of disasters—whether natural or man-made,” said Angie Chan, a representative of Forward Alliance via email.
Forward Alliance trained around 11,000 people over more than 250 workshops in 2024, Chan reported, up from about 6,500 people over more than 160 workshops in 2023. They partner with more than 200 community-based organizations throughout Taiwan, supporting them in providing other training.
Lin Ping-yu has four children, ages 12, 11, 3 and 1, and enough supplies set aside to last his family of five about a week if supply chains to Taiwan are cut off, whether by blockade or a full-out physical war with China. “Many people say that the war will come in three or four years, and I also believe so,” Lin says. “The one thing I am afraid of is, if the government is not responsive to these things and improving, then I think we’ll just [have to] depend on ourselves.”
Lin runs a training group not too different from Jenny Huang’s, but he also represents Xinzhuang district on the New Taipei City Council, registered under the Democratic Progressive Party.
“If there is a blockade . . . I will be busy helping people,” Lin says.
If an emergency comes and his supplies run out, Lin’s family has a backup plan. They will travel to a family-owned farm in the countryside, which is kept running by members of their extended family in peacetime.
Another man, a 55-year-old New Taipei City resident who goes by the nickname “Robinson,” has a similar plan. He asked that his real name not be used out of belief that the Chinese government is compiling a list of people who support Taiwanese independence.
Robinson’s family’s farmhouse, dedicated to growing extra food for relatives who live in the cities, has three stories and is meant to hold 10 people. Plenty of space, Robinson says.
Although Robinson spends much of his time preparing for potential military aggression from China, the family members who live with him in the city have no knowledge of his preparations. To them, his airsoft guns and radios are fun hobbies, and his stacks of survival gear simply reflect a love of camping.
“My friends like making fun of me, like, ‘if anything happens I will be the only one who survives’ because I cook with only gas and fire and no electricity,” Robinson said in an interview in March 2024. “I trained myself to use the least equipment and supplies to camp.”
Robinson served two years in the Taiwanese military, fulfilling his mandatory service, and was on duty in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese government used military force against civilians.
“When Tiananmen happened, I was younger. If the country sent me to war, it was ‘let’s do it’,” Robinson says. “But now, I’m more afraid.”
Not everyone is lucky enough to have family farms in the countryside.
Charles Chi, another Taiwanese national preparing for the worst, helps run a different Facebook group focused on preparations—called 台灣末日生存社 Doomsday Preppers Association, Taiwan, D.P.A.T.—with more than 11,500 members. Chi says about 10% of the group is stockpiling supplies, with just 2-3% training physically.
Chi stores water, batteries, and a first aid kit and other medical supplies, as well as food, including rice, canned meat, dehydrated vegetables, energy bars, pasta, chocolate, and beef and chicken flavorings. He doesn’t store large quantities, though, noting that homes on the island have limited storage space.
Water and food can be adequately produced within Taiwan, according to Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) cognitive warfare expert Yisuo Tzeng. Fuel should be of greater concern, Tzeng says.
Simon Huang’s chief concern is the availability of medical supplies and knowledge, not food or water, he said in an interview in Taoyuan City in March 2024. “We don’t store many food items because, in Taiwan, food is not hard to get, but medical supplies and other supplies are,” he says.
Huang began learning CPR two or three years ago and has since become an emergency medical technician (EMT). On his desk, he keeps a stack of 13 certifications, mostly for emergency medical training. He earned certificates for firearms training abroad as well, but since guns are banned in Taiwan his weapons are all airsoft.
Worries about medical treatment in the event of a national emergency are valid. Taiwan has a good health insurance system, but its medical supply chain depends highly on imports and is therefore relatively vulnerable, according to INDSR policy analyst Frederick Tsiam. Tsiam believes, though, that even if China cut off supply chains into Taiwan, it would still allow humanitarian aid into the country.
Despite concerns about how Taiwan can maintain necessary supplies should supply chains break, experts like Tsiam and Tzeng don’t think China has the capability for a blockade, nor an invasion, of the island. Even if they could blockade the island, Tsiam argues, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense strategically.
“How can they reconcile with blockading Taiwan without stirring waters, inviting intervention from regional countries of concern?” Tzeng asks, pointing to the Taiwan Strait’s importance in international shipping.
Still, for many in Taiwan, relying on Beijing to exercise caution doesn’t feel like a safe bet. Without further reassurances, they’ll keep preparing for the worst.