Better defending Taiwan against China’s gray zone assault

This article was originally published by Pacific Forum. It is republished with permission.

On August 26, 2024, a Shaanxi Y-9 reconnaissance plane (運-9運輸機) from the People’s Liberation Army intruded into Japanese airspace east of the Danjo Islands in the East China Sea for the first time.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan both protested and condemned the act, criticizing Beijing for violating the sovereignty of other nations and destabilizing regional peace.

This latest incursion reflected broader People’s Republic of China (PRC) gray zone tactics, a non-peaceful means it uses to assert sovereignty over Taiwan unilaterally.

Gray zone tactics include behavior-changing conduct and modifying the balance between hostile parties. One might use non-kinetic means to incentivize the other to conform to perceived expectations and challenge security norms.

Intensifying PRC military incursions

In 2016, during Xi Jinping’s first term, the PRC escalated its use of gray zone tactics to coerce Taiwan and neighboring countries. These tactics span the framework known as MIDFIELD, which encompasses military, informational, diplomatic, financial, intelligence, economic, law, and development strategies.

Such conduct violates the rules-based maritime order across the Taiwan Strait and threatens the security balance in the Indo-Pacific. Since September 2020, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has systematically tracked and publicized PRC incursions.

Militarily, the PRC has maintained daily incursions against Taiwanese water, air and near-shore islands. The peak PRC incursion occurred on September 18, 2023, when 103 PLA aircraft intruded into the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ).

Throughout 2022, the frequency and diversity of the PRC aircraft commissioned for incursion have increased, as evidenced by the Taiwanese ministry. In 2022, the number of PRC aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ increased by 79%.

According to open-source data released by the official social media account of MND, in August 2024, the PLAN intruded into Taiwan’s ADIZ with an average daily number of 19 aircraft and nine PLAN vessels (including official ships).

A total of 1,737 PLA aircraft intruded into the Taiwan ADIZ in 2022, while 586 PLA aircraft entered the Taiwan ADIZ within just August 2024. The PRC incursions frequently cross the Strait’s median line, destabilizing the status quo.

On June 25, 2024, Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration expelled four Chinese coast guard vessels intruding into Taiwanese waters off the Quemoy Islands. Correspondingly, experts, including Jude Blanchette of the CSIS think tank, are increasingly concerned about potential PRC provocations against Taiwan in the event of casualties from such maritime collisions.

A collision between the PRC and the Philippines occurred on June 17, 2024, and nearly triggered the United States–Philippines Security Treaty. The latest maritime confrontation on August 31 between the PRC and the Philippines in the South China Sea (SCS) strongly signals the hazards of intentional incursion and its consequences.

Information warfare

In addition to naval and airspace incursions, cyberattacks and election interference have long featured as the PRC’s gray zone tactics in the information domain. Such tactics target Taiwanese public opinion, the center of gravity of cross-strait relations.

Taiwan Minister of Defense Wellington Koo Li-hsiung, during a live-streaming with Taiwan-based media, stated that Taiwan faces over 5 million cyber-attacks daily, primarily from the PRC.

These selective attacks, launched by PRC state-sponsored actors, have been targeting critical civilian infrastructure and government networks. During the 2024 Taiwanese election season, the PRC-sponsored, Fuzhou-based group RedJuliett was reported to have detected vulnerabilities in multiple Taiwanese sectors spanning higher education, government, technology and diplomacy.

Correspondingly, the PRC also targets Taiwanese democracy and de facto autonomy through election interference. Since 1996, the PRC has routinely interfered in Taiwanese elections to prevent pro-independence parties such as the Democratic Progressive Party from gaining power.

Using celebrities and popular media including LINE, TikTok and Facebook, the PRC invests heavily in disinformation campaigns and media warfare to impact Taiwanese public opinion.

Open-source content (often baffled by AI technology such as DeepFake), opinionated with unification signals, aims to shift public support from “diehard Taiwanese separatists” to the PRC’s favored candidates through videos and text-based messages.

Coupled with cyberattacks against Taiwanese infrastructure, interference in Taiwanese elections aims to incentivize the Taiwanese public and leadership to cater to Beijing’s narrative comprehensively.

Cognitive warfare and broader implications

Beijing’s strategic mindset is to win without fighting. Ultimately, the PRC’s priority is to coerce Taiwan into peaceful unification with the mainland without direct conflict.

By isolating Taiwan diplomatically via incentivizing states to shift diplomatic recognition and distorting the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, the PRC advocates for the domestication of the cross-strait issue as its internal affair.

Using gray zone tactics, the PRC intends to convince Taiwan of the power asymmetry between the two parties and thus coerce Taipei into behaving according to Beijing’s interests, ultimately accepting unification.

The success of these efforts has been limited so far. Beijing has achieved modest diplomatic success by isolating Taiwan – Nauru is the latest country to have switched diplomatic recognition to the PRC. But public opinion in Taiwan largely favors maintaining autonomy, reflecting the resilience of Taiwanese democracy against coercion and instilling a sense of hope for the future.

Violations across the military and information domains are just the tip of the iceberg in the PRC’s cognitive warfare (認知戰) against Taiwan.

In general, the PRC is diplomatically isolating, militarily intimidating, economically containing and informationally manipulating Taiwan. Such coercion and non-peaceful means contradict both legal frameworks governing cross-strait relations and dialogue-based practices, such as the 1992 Consensus.

Broadly, gray zone tactics also threatened the strategic objectives of the three Communiqués between the United States and China, especially the peaceful resettlement of the Taiwan issue.

Such an objective has been the pillar supporting US-China Relations since 1979. Meanwhile, the PRC consistently protests unofficial ties between the US and Taiwan that flourish despite Washington’s one-China policy.

In sum, the PRC strives to achieve its strategic objective by imposing psychological costs on Taiwan and identifying coercion and fear-based control as necessary for unification. Members of the international community such as the Republic of Korea, Japan and Australia are voicing diplomatic support for Taiwan with growing consensus.

However, deterring the PRC with political costs is insufficient to disincentivize the gray zone violations. Such a dilemma stems from the PRC’s information manipulation, which manipulates public opinion by applying propaganda, censorship and misinformation strategies.

In short, the PRC’s gray-zone tactics against Taiwan will continue challenging Taiwan’s security and cross-strait peace. Such a security norm exemplifies the potential to evolve into a multi-faceted war; thus, the nature of defending Taiwan’s security calls for coalition deterrence based on military might, winning the information war and economic resilience, highlighting the importance of collective action.

Credible deterrence demands assurance and deterrence threats; thus, coalition-based strategic signaling should feature countermeasures against the PRC’s divide-and-conquer tactics.

As Richard Bush emphasizes, the cross-strait issue stems from political conflicts involving the military domain. The feasibility of strategic ambiguity could be challenged in the cross-strait conflict involving multiple state actors in an interconnected geopolitical era.

The stakes are high: Strategic ambiguity has governed US foreign policy regarding cross-Strait relations for the past 45 years, while Taiwan security is a pacing challenge. This approach has allowed the US to avoid explicitly supporting Taiwan’s independence while maintaining a broad interpretation (e.g., “one China with different interpretations”) of the concept of “China” under the one-China policy. Such a policy has been balancing cross-strait dynamics, which relies on US credibility to prevent either side from modifying the status quo unilaterally.

Thus, to counteract the PRC’s actions against Indo-Pacific state actors and Taiwan, “peace through collective strength” should feature solutions to the cross-strait security dilemma. Multilateral frameworks, especially AUKUS, can impose perceived war costs against the PRC by sharing advanced capabilities. 

For instance, the strategic position of Virginia-class submarines and quantum technologies can strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence in the information and military domain.

Leveraging such initiatives from like-minded allies can help Taiwan strengthen its overall intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage to enhance credible deterrence.

Emerson Tsui (shx007@ucsd.edu), a Taiwan security specialist with expertise in Chinese language and open-source intelligence, is an alumnus of the Carter Center. He’s also a Young Leader of the Pacific Forum, which originally published this article.