1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis
China fired missiles near Taiwan to sway its first presidential election in 1996; the US answered with two aircraft carrier groups.
In the spring of 1996, China tried to frighten Taiwan's voters with live missiles, and the United States answered by sending two aircraft carrier groups toward the island, the largest American show of force in Asia since the Vietnam War. The intimidation failed, the voters were not moved, and the confrontation set the template for every Taiwan Strait scare that has followed.
The trigger
The spark was a visit. In June 1995 Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, traveled to his old university, Cornell, and gave a speech celebrating the island's democratization. It was the first trip to the United States by a sitting Taiwanese leader since Washington cut official ties in 1979 and replaced them with the Taiwan Relations Act, and Beijing read it as the Americans quietly upgrading Taiwan's status. To the PRC, Lee's journey and Taiwan's rapid move toward free elections looked like creeping independence dressed up as democracy. Determined to warn voters ahead of their first direct presidential election, China began a campaign of military pressure that ran from July 1995 into March 1996.
Missiles and carriers
In the days before the March 1996 vote, the People's Liberation Army fired ballistic missiles into shipping lanes near Taiwan's two largest ports, Keelung and Kaohsiung, and staged large exercises with live fire near the coast. The missiles splashed down within tens of miles of the island, disrupting air and sea traffic through some of the busiest waters in Asia. Beijing warned airliners and ships to steer clear of the zones, turning stretches of open ocean into live-fire ranges. Washington responded on a scale not seen in decades. The Clinton administration ordered the carrier USS Independence, forward-deployed in Japan, into waters near Taiwan, and sent the USS Nimitz battle group steaming from the Persian Gulf to join it. Two carriers and their escorts converged on the region, a blunt signal that the US would not let the crisis pass unanswered.
The reckoning
The pressure backfired. On March 23, 1996, Lee won Taiwan's first direct presidential election with 54 percent of the vote, a stronger result than many had expected, as voters rallied against the coercion. In Taiwan itself the missiles rattled the stock market and sent some capital fleeing abroad, yet the panic proved short-lived. The crisis also exposed how far China's military still trailed America's: the PLA could lob missiles but had no answer to two US carrier groups off its coast. Beijing swallowed the humiliation and drew a lesson. In the decades since, it has poured resources into anti-ship missiles, submarines, and a blue-water navy built expressly to keep American carriers far from Taiwan in any future clash. The events of 1995 and 1996 are remembered as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and the standoff they created, missiles from one side and carriers from the other, is still the reference point analysts reach for whenever the strait grows tense.