Lin Feifan tells Berlin that Taiwan will not wait for outside rescue

National Security Council deputy secretary-general Lin Fei-fan told the Berlin Security Conference that Taiwan will strengthen its own defence rather than wait for outsiders to arrive. Speaking on the Total Defence panel of the 25th Berlin Security Conference on 3-4 November 2026, he framed Chinese military and hybrid pressure as a shared problem for Taiwan and for Europe and said effective deterrence cannot rest on any single state.

Lin cited the scale of the pressure Taiwan faces. He said Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan's air defence identification zone about 5,400 times last year, with about 3,000 of those sorties crossing the Taiwan Strait median line. From late 2024, he added, China has also run large first-island-chain maritime drills that often put more than 100 ships at sea.

He folded undersea cables and cyber volume into the same picture. Taiwan has seen roughly seven to eight undersea cable breaks a year since 2023, with about 40 percent linked to non-compliant Chinese vessels in the figures he presented. He also said Taiwan absorbs about 2.8 million cyberattacks a day against government sites, energy, medical services, private firms and other critical infrastructure.

Lin summarised Taiwan's whole-of-society defence work in three points. The first was political leadership: President Lai Ching-te, he said, ordered from day one that the government explain geopolitical risk to the public rather than soft-pedal it. The second was transparency. Lin said Taiwan has opened recent exercise imagery, including tanks on city roads, Patriot batteries near Taipei 101, troops using the metro for logistics drills, and civil agencies training beside the military, arguing that more information builds trust.

The third point was public confidence. Lin argued that confidence sits at the core of resilience, and that society cannot carry the preparation it needs if people doubt their own ability to defend. He linked that theme to Ukraine, saying the war has shown that people power and resilience can both be built through investment and training.

On cyber, Lin told partners that Europe is looking to Taiwan after attacks on public infrastructure there, including remote tampering with supermarket refrigeration in France that spoiled food. He said Taiwan keeps overseas cloud backups for key public-service data so core functions can survive disruption, and that Taipei is auditing systems and working with like-minded countries on cyber defence. Cyber specialists, he said, have called Taiwan a perfect honeypot because the volume of attacks yields usable intelligence that Taiwan is willing to share.

Lin said next year's urban resilience drills are meant to integrate more tightly with the annual Han Kuang military exercises so local governments and military units can rehearse the same wartime scenarios together. This year Taiwan already required civilian agencies to join the largest urban resilience exercise under military-style assumptions. He also pointed to a household civil-defence handbook issued nationwide when a German panellist asked how ordinary people build crisis awareness.

He told the conference that Taiwan knows its own responsibility and will not sit and wait for rescue, while also arguing that the Taiwan Strait's stakes for global development mean deterrence has to combine whole-of-society effort with international cooperation. With China and Russia both expanding military activity in their regions, he said, no single country can carry that load alone.

Central News Agency and Liberty Times carried the Taipei readout of the Total Defence remarks; Taipei Times separately reported Lin's Berlin comments on cyber sharing, urban drills and the no-wait-for-rescue line. The conference itself listed Lin among the Total Defence speakers alongside European defence and civil-protection officials.