Taiwan’s Civilian Defenders Are Clamoring for U.S. Military Training

Residents of Taipei are training for a Chinese invasion. Will it be enough?

Taipei, Taiwan — A Ukrainian flag fluttered in the yard of a Presbyterian church located a stone’s throw from Taiwan’s legislature, as a crowd gathered inside on a recent weekend for a wedding rehearsal. Meanwhile, in a conference room below, a few dozen people prepared for an expected Chinese invasion of their country.

Although some officials and experts have attempted to offer a timeline, no one knows precisely when Beijing might launch an assault, should the regime ultimately choose that path. Nevertheless, with Chinese military threats escalating and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at front of mind, at least a handful of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens are preparing for an attack.

During a recent full-day session, which National Review attended, participants in the training listened to lectures on People’s Liberation Army military tactics, learned how to spot and debunk Chinese disinformation, and practiced tying tourniquets for simultaneous injuries on multiple limbs.

Dedicated to civil-defense activities, these groups do not closely resemble the territorial-defense militias that have come to play a significant role in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. But that war has spurred people to action here in Taiwan.

At what scale remains to be seen. Organizers from the group that held the training course, called Kuma Academy, said that around 35 people, mostly from the Taipei area, attended the weekend’s training, and that these classes take place just about every two weeks. They’d like to eventually get U.S. military trainers involved — though the likelihood of such a request being honored is unclear at this stage.

For now, these groups have increasing prominence, but it has not necessarily led to a massive reach. The vast majority of these courses to date have taken place in Taipei, the country’s largest city but not at all its only sizeable metropolitan area. Still, they play a critical role in shaking Taiwanese people out of their complacency about the likelihood of a Chinese attack within the next few years.

“I think the most important element in our national defense is your mental defense and also your civilian defense,” Cheng-hui Ho, one of the co-founders of Kuma Academy, told NR through a translator. “If we spend so much money on building our national military power but our people have no will to fight, those investments, our military budget, will mainly be wasted.”

The program has been under way for only a few months and is in its earliest stages, but the organizers have ambitions to scale up their project. Notably, they want to prepare the Taiwanese populace for a full-scale Chinese military assault by partnering, ideally, with the United States.

One development that will help Kuma Academy grow is a recent $20 million donation by the controversial Robert Tsao, a Taiwanese microchip tycoon who recently pledged a small fortune toward standing up a civilian army to defend Taiwan. The organization’s goal is to train 3 million people within three years, by eventually offering three to four classes per week across the country. Ho said that Tsao’s donation will help them run sessions in other large cities, such as Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Tainan.

“We are studying the scenario in Ukraine, and American support for it, and how civil defense, military defense, and mental awareness” work together, said Ho, who is also affiliated with the Taiwan Association for Strategic Simulation think tank. “We hope that Americans can share their knowledge about their experiences from the real battlefield,” he added, specifying that he’d like to see training from members of the U.S. military and National Guard, as well as federal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Eventually, Kuma Academy aims to organize classes at different levels, featuring advanced medical training and weapons practice for those who seek it out, which would effectively defy Taiwan’s gun-averse culture. There are significant restrictions on firearm ownership here.

Puma Shen, the group’s other co-founder, specified to NR that weapons training would likely take place only through an intermediary, such as a retired military officers’ association — and that such a course offering is about two years away. Kuma is preparing Taiwan for a sea change in how the public views the country’s preparations for a military attack, and Shen said that they’re careful not to rock the boat too much in the short term.

This most recent training began with a briefing by Ho on Chinese military capabilities, featuring slides on the PLA’s missile capabilities, lessons from the war in Ukraine, and Taiwan’s own capabilities. Shen then spoke about how Chinese propagandists target specific audiences within Taiwan using various kinds of disinformation.

What followed was a two-hour-long medical-training session, featuring an exercise in which participants practiced tying tourniquets around one another’s limbs and dragging other participants, simulating wounded and incapacitated people, across the floor.

Not everyone had an easy time with that. At one point, an instructor complained that one participant was giving his partners too easy a job, by standing up slightly so that they weren’t dragging his full weight. The exercise was intended to give two participants practice dragging a heavier person. Another man volunteered: “I’m a heavier load that meets your description,” he said, to laughs from the group.

One participant, Anne Shih, a 35-year-old Taipei resident, told NR that she had decided to sign up for Kuma Academy after a friend told her about it. She made a small donation to participate, she said, adding that she’s concerned about the Chinese military threat.

“Older generations normally would say ‘you’re so young, you don’t have to know about this, you’re a woman, you don’t need to do those things that soldiers should do.’ But I think we should get ourselves ready to do something hands-on to help back up the military.” Shih added that she has no interest in joining future weapons-training sessions, since she’s a physiotherapist and would prefer to assist in a medical role. Shih is hopeful that the lesson on disinformation will help her deal with an aunt susceptible to pro-Beijing narratives.

Forward Alliance, another new emergency-response group, was started by Enoch Wu, a former special forces soldier and a rising star affiliated with Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party. In an interview, Wu said that his group would leave the weapons trainings to the military but that the Russian invasion of Ukraine provided a catalyst to spur people to action.

“We offer trauma first aid, we offer light search and rescue, we offer emergency communication, shelter management, community safety — essentially all the building blocks and the critical pieces that make a community resilient.” He pointed to the fact that Taiwan’s military, law enforcement, and firefighters make up only 1 percent of the population, adding that his group aimed to train the other 99 percent on how to act during a disaster.

Wu said the ultimate goal of his advocacy is the creation of a wholly decentralized defense system, in which the military, a homeland-defense force, and civilian defenders all play a role. To date, 90 percent of Forward Alliance workshops have taken place in Taipei, although they’re in the process of setting up an office in the southern city of Kaohsiung. Wu estimates that 2,000–3,000 people have attended Forward Alliance courses since they began in March.

The Taiwanese government has identified civil-defense groups as a critical aspect of an asymmetric defense strategy and in January set up a new agency — the All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency — to coordinate the military-reserve system and civilian defenders. To date, however, it’s unclear what that new office’s reach is, and it does not seem to have engaged much, if at all, with these civilian-defense groups.

Another program based on a similar idea is under the umbrella of a group called Open Knowledge Taiwan. It offers lectures but aims to outsource medical and other disaster-preparedness training to well-established groups that enjoy a much wider reach than the newcomers.

T. H. Schee, the former tech entrepreneur who runs Open Knowledge, told NR that about a thousand people have already gone through his group’s new civil-defense offerings, comprising around 30 events online and in-person since early February. “If anyone wanted training, we would recommend that they go to existing groups which may not identify themselves as part of the civil-defense thing,” said Schee, saying that certain groups have been doing this for decades already. Taiwan’s Red Cross, local gyms, and ham-radio operators’ associations can all play various roles in this broader effort.

Overall, the newcomers have a pro-Taiwan — in Kuma’s case, even a pro-independence — bent to them, though Shen notes that a fair share of Kuma’s participants are apolitical and some even sympathize with the opposition KMT party, which is less hawkish on China. The church where Kuma Academy holds its courses is known to be a center of pro-independence political activity. Schee emphasizes that his group is completely apolitical.

In addition to Kuma, Forward Alliance sees international support of the civil-defense movement as critically important. Asked whether Taiwan is moving fast enough to shore up its defenses, Wu said: “My personal view is that we can’t move fast enough. We can’t be prepared enough, but we also can’t go at it alone.”

“I would say that the whole world is woefully underprepared for continued Chinese aggression,” he continued. “China isn’t Taiwan’s problem alone.”

Editor’s Note: The author traveled to Taiwan on a trip sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but this piece reflects reporting conducted after the program was over, when the author extended the trip at his own expense.