I was really impressed by this. It's hard for me to imagine what it's like for people either to be under constant attack, as with Ukraine, or living with the realistic fear of an invasion in the not-too-distant future, as with Taiwan.
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In a polarized Taiwan, some residents are training to defend their country.
By Brook Larmer
Albee Lee leads a double life. During the week, the 29-year-old with a tattoo of a skateboarding duck cleans houses in the city of Hsinchu, the hub of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. On weekends, she prepares for a Chinese invasion.
China’s intensifying military maneuvers around Taiwan — at a time when the United States is distracted and depleted by the war in Iran — seem designed to intimidate the self-governed island’s 23 million inhabitants. For Lee, however, China’s scare tactics have only sharpened her desire to defend Taiwan, an outpost of democracy that produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips. Along with thousands of other civilians — artists and academics, firefighters and engineers — Lee has joined a growing civil-defense movement that often engages in live-simulation disaster training.
Now, along with her cleaning supplies, Lee carries a meticulously assembled emergency first-aid kit. “I don’t want to live under Chinese Communist Party rule,” she says. “If China were to invade, I refuse to hand my life over.”
“If China were to invade, I refuse to hand my life over,” says Albee Lee, a house cleaner who took part in an F.R.A. civil-defense drill in April....
While older preppers tend to be men, more than 70 percent of the civil-defense activists are women. “Women are more willing to save their country,” says Chu Fu-ming, Kuma Academy’s male chief executive. “Many women are highly motivated to understand what they can actually do in a crisis,” he says, “to protect their families and the people around them.”
The standoff between China and Taiwan is a study in asymmetry. In size, population and military prowess, the nation of 1.4 billion people overwhelms the island of 23 million. The Chinese military has two million soldiers compared with 230,000 in Taiwan, and China’s naval vessels outnumber Taiwan’s by a similar margin. Even in warplanes, a centerpiece of Taiwan’s defense, China has a nearly five-to-one advantage.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/18/magazine/taiwan-china-invasion-defense.html