Imagine a fleet of Chinese ships suddenly appearing in the Taiwan Strait, tasked with inspecting all vessels traveling through the busy thoroughfare—including on the Taiwanese side. Or a Chinese fighter jet crashing off the Taiwanese coast and Chinese warships blockading the island to look for it.
One of these events actually happened, the other is part of a new Taiwanese television show, but the events feel equally real. “A Chinese Y-8 reconnaissance aircraft entered the South China Sea at 10 a.m. today and crashed into the Pacific, right off Taiwan’s east coast. In the name of search and rescue, the Chinese army deployed its navy and air force. … Taiwan is now under a de facto blockade,” a news anchor announces on Taiwanese TV.
Thus begins Zero Day Attack, which began airing in Taiwan this month. In addition to providing entertainment, the show’s objective is to warn the Taiwanese of large-scale Chinese interference. As threats from China and Russia loom, such stories are needed far beyond Taiwan.
Taiwan’s misfortune doesn’t end with the blockade. The People’s Liberation Army’s search and rescue operation turns into an encirclement of Taiwan, both in the water and in the air. (Such operations would be easy for China, which in real life has the world’s largest naval fleet, and whose air force has been undergoing major modernization and expansion.) It’s frightening, and Taiwan needs imports and exports to survive, but the Taiwanese get on with their lives.
Then Chinese military vehicles appear in the streets. Then the internet starts cutting out. (An influencer in the middle of recording a video can’t believe she’s been cut off.) Then, with the internet gone, the financial system collapses. Enraged residents can’t use credit cards or make smartphone payments, and ATMs can’t dispense cash. Hacker attacks on infrastructure follow, as does sabotage. Life quickly becomes extremely cumbersome. The outgoing president, about to be succeeded by the recent presidential election’s winner, records a message to the nation: “Without freedom, Taiwan is not Taiwan.” Around him, the attacks continue to grow, in variety and intensity.
Zero Day Attack is compelling television; the trailer has been watched 2.5 million times. The show, which premiered in Taiwan on Aug. 2, features 10 episodes, and while it may simply be brilliant television for anyone who manages to watch the series outside of Taiwan, for the Taiwanese themselves, the storyline is frighteningly real.
In 2023, immediately after then-U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted the Taiwanese president in California, Beijing dispatched an inspection fleet to the Taiwan Strait. The message was unmistakably clear: China could decide to inspect the roughly 240 ships that pass through every day; if it did, massive delays would ensue and shipping routes would be altered to avoid the strait. Taiwan would be cut off.
The inspection flotilla is, of course, not the only aggressive act Taiwan has had to endure in recent years. There have been disinformation campaigns, election interference, cyberattacks, and sudden blockades of Taiwanese food exports. When China abruptly suspended imports of Taiwanese pineapples, the #FreedomPineapple campaign sought to soften the effects of the Chinese ban.
And there have been multiple suspicious cable cuts. In February 2023, two Chinese merchant vessels cut the two lines connecting the Matsu Islands with the rest of Taiwan. This February, the Taiwanese coast guard caught a Chinese ship in the act of cutting another Taiwanese cable.
Most Taiwanese are aware that their country is at risk, but the government, whose culture ministry has helped fund Zero Day Attack, believes the public needs a reminder—including the fact that the harm may not stop at cable-cutting and cyberattacks. (It’s a sign of the times that Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom also contributed funding: Chunghwa owns the cables that have been damaged by Chinese ships.)
Taiwan is on the front lines, but other nations could benefit from such edutainment. The last time the West saw a spate of invasion fiction, it was in the run-up to WWI, when British writers regularly warned of the menace to Britain’s shores posed by the Hun—one that, in the event, the Royal Navy had little problem warding off. During the Cold War, stories like Red Dawn popped up sporadically, but they tended to be more focused on improbable scenarios than realism or education.
Like Taiwan, other democracies have seen hostile states target them in a variety of ways in recent years: Beyond the ubiquitous cyberattacks and influence campaigns, there have been subsea cable cuts, arson attacks, parcel bombs, election interference, weaponization of migration, sabotage of cars, GPS jamming, “weather balloons,” and much else.
But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, most of this goes unseen and unnoticed. That leaves governments with a dilemma: How to convince voters that defense budgets need to increase when they’re largely unaware of the aggression?
About a decade ago, the Norwegian series Occupied did for Norwegians what Zero Day Attack is now setting out to do for the Taiwanese. It, too, was compelling television—so compelling that global audiences binged it on Netflix. National security is, in fact, the best possible entertainment; it has nail-biting drama, variety, panorama shots of famous cities, all manner of people—and these days it’s also bound to have repair crews fixing cables on stormy seas.
These might be scary futures, and sometimes less likely ones, but it’s worth thinking about them now. Taiwan’s residents can be better prepared, and television dramas could educate the public in most other countries too. I have every faith that Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian (again), German, and British television would make a smashing job of it. Let’s see what global entertainment can come up with.
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