Taiwan: In Case of Crisis, National Public Safety Guide (2025)

In Case of Crisis: Taiwan’s National Public Safety Guide is the 2025 civil-defence handbook issued by Taiwan’s All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency. It runs to 36 pages in three chapters, it treats earthquakes and military aggression inside a single response framework, and it ends with two pages the reader is told to cut out and keep. It supersedes the 2023 All-Out Defense Contingency Handbook, which The Resistance Hub also hosts. Both are hosted here in full.

What this document is

The guide opens not with instructions but with questions. Two pages of them, addressed to the reader: how many people are in your family, are there seniors, children or pets, if communications fail does your family have an agreed meeting point, how long would your food last once the refrigerator stops, how many days of medication do you hold for chronic conditions, do you know where your nearest emergency shelter is. It is a diagnostic, and putting it first sets the tone for everything after. The document assumes an unprepared reader and works to make that visible before it starts issuing advice.

Chapter one is advance preparation. Household supplies are set at a one week minimum on a rolling stockpile principle, stock up, use, restock, with three litres of drinking water per person per day. The go bag has its own specification, including separate sublists for babies, elders and pets, a repack check every six months, storage by the front door, and a stated weight ceiling of 15 kg for men and 10 kg for women. Then come the two siren patterns, the emergency alert message formats, a short cybersecurity list, and the Disaster Prevention Specialist certification, a two day course and examination that produces a certificate and an identity card.

Chapter two is the crisis itself. It begins with self-help and mutual aid, on the stated reasoning that in a crisis the emergency services “may be overwhelmed with tasks”: burns, toxic chemical exposure, nuclear accidents, unconsciousness and CPR at 100 to 120 compressions per minute to a depth of at least 5 cm, haemorrhage control including improvised tourniquets, AED use, and four methods of moving an injured person. It then splits the threat picture into natural disasters and military aggression, and gives each its own response section.

The military aggression material is specific about what it expects. The listed forms of threat are sabotage of critical infrastructure and undersea cables with large-scale digital paralysis, non-friendly naval vessels demanding to board and inspect Taiwanese vessels, live-fire drills or a unilaterally declared no-fly zone under the guise of exercises, non-friendly unmanned aerial vehicles in Taiwanese airspace, a unilateral halt to traffic and commercial activity through the strait, and attacks, infiltration and sabotage. On spotting military activity the instruction is to leave, then to take cover away from doors and windows, and not to photograph or upload the movements of Taiwan’s own forces.

One line in the guide does more work than the rest of the chapter. Under Getting Accurate Information it prints: “In the event of a military invasion of Taiwan, any claim that the government has surrendered or that the nation has been defeated is false.” That is a pre-commitment published in advance so that a future claim can be identified as false at the moment it appears. Sweden’s brochure carries the same device in almost the same words, which makes the pairing worth studying on its own.

The closing chapter is recruitment. It lists the routes by which a civilian can take a role: auxiliary police and traffic police, auxiliary firefighters, non-governmental civil defence organisations, alternative service reservists and military reservists reporting on recall, Disaster Prevention Specialist certification, volunteer service in the armed forces, and community volunteering. The last two pages are perforated in intent rather than in fact: a template on which to paste a printed local map marked with the nearest air raid shelter, hospital, relief station and rationing point, three agreed family meeting points and three contact numbers, and a second copy of the go bag checklist to put in the bag.

The two siren patterns, as printed

Contents

Provenance and lineage

The publisher is the All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency, which sits under Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense and maintains the guide’s own website. No individual authors, editors or illustrators are credited anywhere in the file, and no ISBN, edition statement or publication number is printed.

The relationship to the earlier handbook needs stating precisely, because it has been got wrong before. The All-Out Defense Contingency Handbook of 2023 and In Case of Crisis: Taiwan’s National Public Safety Guide of 2025 are two different documents issued two years apart by the same agency. They are not two printings of one work and they are not duplicates. The 2025 guide supersedes the 2023 handbook, which remains hosted here for comparison: All-Out Defense Contingency Handbook, 2023, 48 pages, 5.6 MB.

A technical note explains an earlier cataloguing error. The 2025 guide’s title page is a flat image with no text layer, so its title, publisher and year cannot be read by extracting text from the file. They have to be read visually. Any process that identifies documents from an extracted text layer will fail on this one, which is the likeliest reason it was originally filed against the wrong title.

No rights notice is printed anywhere in the file. That is an observation about the document’s own pages and nothing more. It is not a claim that the work is in the public domain and it grants no permission to reproduce it.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

Taiwan’s guide is the clearest working example in the set indexed on National Preparedness Guides of a state folding natural-disaster and armed-conflict preparedness into one instruction set rather than treating them as separate literatures. That integration is the practical counterpart to the argument in Small States’ Total Defense Strategy, and its opening self-audit questions are the closest published match to the method used in Scenario Planning for Emergencies.

Its one week rolling stockpile and weight-capped go bag are the most specific household figures in the whole set and feed directly into Physical Resilience Preparedness. The chapters on anxiety and on talking to children about military aggression sit alongside Mental Resilience During Emergencies. Readers interested in the pre-committed denial of a surrender claim should read this against Psychological Resilience: Small Nations, which treats that technique directly.

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