China has built not only a military to coerce Taiwan, but an army of lawyers to intimidate and constrain it. In 2025, Beijing’s lawfare campaign shifted decisively from largely declaratory threats to active enforcement. The objective is not legal resolution but deterrence: raising the personal cost of engagement with Taiwan’s democracy and normalising coercion under the fig leaf of law.
One clear indicator is the sharp rise in the detention and restriction of Taiwanese nationals in mainland China just in 2025. While Beijing frames these detentions as routine law enforcement, the pattern points to a deliberate strategy: using vague or politicised national-security charges to intimidate Taiwanese citizens, deter travel and engagement with the mainland, and signal that legal risk now attaches to Taiwanese identity itself.
According to Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, reported cases of Taiwanese citizens going missing, being detained for questioning, or having their personal freedom restricted rose from single-digit monthly figures in 2024 to double-digit figures throughout 2025. By late November, 221 cases had been reported to the Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation, compared with 55 across all of 2024.
This trend sits alongside a more overt legal escalation: Beijing’s move to ‘prosecute’ alleged Taiwanese ‘separatists’. Chinese authorities are increasingly simulating formal criminal process against named individuals outside their jurisdiction. This approach asserts an explicitly extraterritorial claim: that the Chinese Communist Party can investigate, list and punish Taiwanese citizens regardless of nationality, residence or international law. These actions are intended to chill political speech, constrain international engagement with Taiwan, and signal that support for Taiwanese democracy carries personal costs.
The most striking example in 2025 was the targeting of Taiwanese legislator and civil-society leader Puma Shen. Shen, a legal scholar and prominent researcher of Chinese influence operations, is also a founder of the Kuma Academy, a civil-defence and public-education initiative focused on democratic resilience. In late October 2025, the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau announced it had opened a criminal investigation into Shen for alleged ‘secession’, accusing him of promoting ‘Taiwan independence’ through his civic activities. Chinese state-linked media went further, suggesting Shen could face international pursuit, including through Interpol, despite the absence of jurisdiction or credible legal pathways.
This move signals an evolution in China’s lawfare toolkit. Human-rights organisations rightly described the case as transnational repression, but its strategic significance goes further. Rather than relying on blacklists or symbolic travel bans, Beijing publicly named a specific police organ, invoked criminal statutes, and portrayed legal process as already underway. The logical next step is to internationalise that process: seeking Interpol red notices, testing extradition arrangements, and pressuring third countries to treat Chinese domestic law as enforceable beyond China’s borders.
Beijing’s management of its list of so-called die-hard Taiwan independence separatists reinforces this point. In 2025, only one new entity was added directly to the list. Authorities expanded the scope of punishment horizontally, targeting family members and associated businesses. In June, punitive measures were imposed on SICUENS International, a Taiwan-based bicycle supplier linked to the father of Puma Shen, who had been listed in 2024. The message was unambiguous: political activism can generate legal and economic consequences not just for individuals, but for their families and commercial networks.
At the same time, Beijing increasingly operationalised the narrative of a ‘Taiwan independence online army’. This does not describe a real organisation. Rather, it functions as a flexible legal and political label used to conflate democratic speech, online activism, media commentary and cyber activity into a single ‘secessionist’ threat.
In 2025, the Ministry of State Security and other Chinese state bodies repeatedly claimed to have uncovered Taiwanese-backed online influence operations, naming individuals and companies without independent verification. Fujian authorities escalated the approach further by issuing bounty notices and naming-and-shaming campaigns against alleged participants in psychological warfare and online manipulation.
These actions are legally meaningless outside of China. But that is beside the point. As instruments of lawfare, they serve three purposes. First, they justify Beijing’s coercive measures under the guise of enforcing its own domestic laws. Second, they blur the boundary between lawful political expression and criminal behaviour thereby raising perceived legal risk for journalists, activists and influencers. Third, they reinforce Beijing’s narrative that Taiwan’s democracy itself is a hostile disinformation actor, rather than a legitimate political system.
For policymakers, the implication is clear. Lawfare is no longer a supporting domain of effort in Beijing’s Taiwan strategy; it is a central instrument of pressure. Recognising and responding to this shift, through clearer diplomatic signalling, coordinated responses to transnational repression, and support for Taiwan’s legal resilience, will be essential to managing cross-strait stability in the years ahead.
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