How China's 'greyzone warfare' is designed to subdue the enemy

Having crushed the resistance to its rule in Hong Kong, China is moving against Taiwan with irregular tactics meant to exhaust the island's military.

Months after eliminating a popular challenge to its rule in Hong Kong, China is turning to an even higher-stakes target: self-governing Taiwan. The island has been bracing for conflict with China for decades, and in some respects, that battle has now begun.

It’s not the final, titanic clash that Taiwan has long feared, with Chinese troops storming the beaches. Instead, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s two-million-strong military, has launched a form of “greyzone” warfare. In this irregular type of conflict, which stops short of an actual shooting war, the aim is to subdue the foe through exhaustion.

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Beijing is conducting waves of threatening forays from the air while ratcheting up existing pressure tactics to erode Taiwan’s will to resist, say current and former senior Taiwanese and US military officers.

The flights, they say, complement amphibious landing exercises, naval patrols, cyber attacks and diplomatic isolation. The risk of conflict is now at its highest level in decades. PLA aircraft have been flying menacingly towards airspace around Taiwan sometimes launching multiple sorties on the same day.

Data shows that in periods when political tension across the Taiwan Strait peaks, China sends more aircraft, including some of its most potent fighters and bombers.

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These encroachment tactics are “super effective,” Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who until last year was the commander of the Taiwanese military, told Reuters in an interview. “You say it’s your garden, but it turns out that it is your neighbor who’s hanging out in the garden all the time. With that action, they are making a statement that it’s their garden - and that garden is one step away from your house.”

Under President Xi Jinping, China has accelerated the development of forces the PLA would need one day to conquer the island of 23 million - a mission that is the country’s top military priority, according to Chinese and Western analysts.

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With Hong Kong and the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang under ever-tighter control, Taiwan is the last remaining obstacle to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

In a major speech early last year, Xi said that Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a Chinese province, “must be, will be” unified with China. He set no deadline but would not rule out the use of force.

Chinese military and government agencies have switched from decades of “theoretical talk” about taking Taiwan by force to debating and working on plans for possible military action, a senior Taiwanese security official responsible for intelligence on China told Reuters.

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Admiral Lee, the retired Taiwanese military chief, believes the only thing holding back the PLA from a full assault is that it hasn’t yet achieved the overwhelming firepower needed to overrun the island.

Even so, China’s military build-up over the past 20 years means it is now “far ahead” of Taiwan, he said. “Time is definitely not on Taiwan’s side,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time for them to gather enough strength.”

PLA troops have been garrisoned in Hong Kong since the city returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Yet the city’s protest movement was quashed not by military force, but by a combination of aggressive policing, the imposition of a draconian national security law and the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which enabled the government to ban all mass gatherings.

For Xi, democratic Taiwan is now the last outpost of resistance to his dream of a unified and rejuvenated China that can displace the United States as the major power in the Asia-Pacific region.

Taiwan has remained effectively independent since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Republic of China government retreated to the island after the Chinese Civil War.

Bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s wing would give the PLA a commanding position in Asia. It would entrench the Chinese military in the middle of the so-called first island chain – the string of islands from the Japanese archipelago in the north, down to the Philippines and on to Borneo, which enclose China’s coastal seas.

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The PLA Navy could dominate the shipping lanes to North Asia, giving Beijing a powerful lever over Japan and South Korea. And the PLA Navy would have free access to the Western Pacific.

Standing in the way of that dream is the United States. It would be catastrophic to America’s dominance in the region if Chinese forces took control of Taiwan, most military analysts believe, whether by "greyzone" tactics or full-scale invasion. America’s global prestige and role as security guarantor in Asia would be shattered, they say.

Already, Beijing’s recent assertiveness, including its fortification of contested islets in the South China Sea, has galvanised an American-led response.

 Xi, for now, has opted for "greyzone warfare". Without firing a shot, China’s military is sorely taxing Taiwan’s Air Force.

The theater of action is Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). An ADIZ is an area that stretches beyond a territory’s air space where air traffic controllers request incoming flights to identify themselves.

When PLA aircraft enter Taiwan’s ADIZ, fighters scramble in response. On occasion, air-defense missile units are put on alert. 

The PLA mostly relies on three kinds of aircraft - anti-submarine, electronic-warfare and airborne early-warning-and-control - to conduct its regular missions into Taiwan’s ADIZ, the flight-tracking data show. The use of these aircraft allows the PLA to gather intelligence on the island’s defenses, as well as Taiwanese and allied submarine activity in the area, Taiwanese, US and other Western military intelligence officers say.

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