In March 2025, China\u2019s military researchers published a concept describing how to rapidly capture and subdue the city of Taipei. Distributed in restricted military channels, this approach argues Beijing can achieve victory \u201cby blocking the city\u2019s ability to receive external assistance, restricting its ability to enable operations, breaking its operational system, collapsing cognitive cohesion, and eliminating its ability to recover.\u201d Its objective is to break the Taiwan people\u2019s will to fight.<\/p>\n
While this concept is not yet doctrine, it is an important and rarely seen example of how China\u2019s military strategy and research inform the way it plans to fight a war over Taiwan. The authors\u2019 framework operationalizes China\u2019s new military strategy of \u201cnational total war,\u201d referring to whole-of-nation mobilization, and \u201ccognitive domain operations,\u201d referring to influencing the mental space where people and organizations make decisions. Details on both remain sparse, particularly in the context of how they may support the Chinese military\u2019s primary mission of capturing Taiwan.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll-domain megacity incapacitation warfare\u201d (\u5927\u578b\u57ce\u5e02\u5168\u57df\u5931\u80fd\u6218) describes in remarkable detail how China\u2019s military might capture Taipei by integrating military firepower with cognitive effects. An article from the March 2025 edition of Military Art, China\u2019s leading internal journal on military theory, proposes this idea. The Central Military Commission oversees and approves this journal, and its official circulation is limited to restricted military channels. Because the journal is closely held within China\u2019s military, the article\u2019s authors have liberty to speak in specifics and without varnish as they inject their concept into China\u2019s internal debate on how to plan a war on Taiwan.<\/p>\n
Most public U.S. defense analysis and wargames focus on modeling kinetic exchanges during a military blockade or invasion of Taiwan. Studies on Taiwan\u2019s will to fight rely on survey data of respondents imagining how they may react in a future conflict. Rarely do these analyses examine wartime cognitive attacks directly targeting Taiwan\u2019s will to fight.<\/p>\n
Understanding China\u2019s strategy is not only important for Taipei. National total war reflects the Chinese military\u2019s understanding of how to fight and win modern wars, and it is at the heart of China\u2019s planning regarding a potential future war with the United States. To understand the impact of national total war, U.S. analyses should measure and model cognitive effects.<\/p>\n