Think China Can Take Taiwan Easily? Think Again

Russia ran a
similar playbook
prior to its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, depicting its military as an overpowering force. And while Russia is and remains an existential threat to Ukrainian sovereignty, the Russian façade of invincibility was
quickly exposed
by fierce and sustained Ukrainian resistance against a foe with significant materiel and numerical advantages.

It's another riff on the story of David versus Goliath. What China and Russia fail to remember is that, in that story, David wins.

To expose this deception for what it is while revealing the Chinese vulnerabilities it seeks to cover requires a multipronged approach:

• First, policymakers and the analysts who inform them must understand the nature and depth of Beijing's influence operations.
• Second, they must appreciate the relative weaknesses of China and strengths of Taiwan in an invasion scenario.
• Finally, they must comprehensively counter the narrative of overwhelming Chinese strength and inoculate their populations against malign Chinese influence activities.

China's influence campaign in pursuit of this cognitive fait accompli is conducted across multiple lines of operation. The most obvious includes the overt demonstration of military strength in drills and exercises such as Joint Sword 2024A and accompanying propaganda videos.

China's campaign is amplified on social media. The Chinese Communist Party funds the
wumao , tens-to-hundreds of thousands of internet users paid by the Chinese government to repeat the regime's propaganda and swarm those who appear to offer views that are critical of it.

In addition, the Chinese government annually produces hundreds of millions of internet posts to
distract users
from any critical discussion of the party. Such influence operations occur not just
on Weibo , the state-controlled Chinese social media platform, but also across X and other platforms to influence Western audiences. Many of these, despite their ham-fistedness, continue to generate significant followings and engagement.

This aggressive push across all information fronts is meant not just to convey Chinese strength, but also to conceal its weaknesses relative to the realities of attempting to militarily seize Taiwan. Such an operation would require both the isolation and blockade of Taiwan and an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait.

China certainly has the air and maritime strength to
establish a blockade
around Taiwan, but maintaining one could become
strategically
tenuous
for Beijing if it upended China's economy, especially its international trade. It also would be operationally tenuous due to factors such as logistical sustainment, maintenance, and airspace control and coordination.

Blockade demonstrations such as Joint Sword 2024A are incredibly costly and inflict across-the-board stress on Chinese capabilities, despite the demonstations' temporary nature. A full, protracted blockade over time would contront the Chinese military system with stress of a higher order of magnitude, making sustainment suspect and vulnerable to disruption.

Should the United States and its allies intervene militarily, the“patrol boxes” vaunted on
Chinese diagrams
of their latest drill could just as easily become“kill boxes” for Taiwanese and US forces to target Chinese ships, especially those off of the island's eastern coast.

Chinese power projection from the mainland PRC coast to Taiwan's east coast is relatively straightforward, and China is likely to maintain superiority along such lines of operation. But Taiwan's east coast is more easily supported by allies and partners, who could intervene from the territory of Japan and the Philippines or via air and naval power from the Pacific. While China would likely maintain military dominance in the Taiwan Strait, maintaining it east of Taiwan is a fool's errand.

Policymakers should also highlight the sheer
difficulty
of a cross-strait attack. An amphibious assault from China into Taiwan would be larger and more complex than the Allied
invasion of Normandy
in World War II, requiring joint planning and coordination that the bifurcated and politically divided services of the PLA
lack .

A more apt analogy might be the failed Allied
Gallipoli campaign
of World War I, because China likely would lack the ability to achieve operational surprise and would be sailing into
deadly waters
filled with
mines
and
munitions . And while Chinese troops may eventually make it to Taiwan's shores, they likely would find themselves stranded and
contained .

Establishing a lodgment is one thing; securing and expanding it is another. A 2023
report
by Mark F Cancian, Matthew Cancian, and Eric Heginbotham identifies the many difficulties China would face in establishing a lodgment. The report identifies other approaches that the United States and Taiwan could pursue to contain such a lodgment or prevent its establishment.

The
weaknesses
inherent within an authoritarian, communist system only exacerbate these operational factors.

Countering China's malign narrative requires proactive and preemptive action. First, policymakers must highlight and communicate to their publics China's weaknesses and Taiwan's strengths in an invasion scenario to the greatest degree that classification and prudence permit.

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They should reinforce, as often as possible, the
will of many Taiwanese
to fight for their autonomy and the strength and willingness of the United States, along with its allies and partners, to
support Taiwan
in such a fight. Put another way, they must demonstrate the net effect for the overall defense of Taiwan of the tightening alliances
and
partnerships that are being forged into a shield that
continues
to repel Chinese aggression.

Policymakers should highlight the example of Russia as an overconfident“emperor with no clothes” and note the parallels between Moscow and Beijing.

Finally, various other efforts aimed at inoculating society against disinformation should be pursued in Taiwan and elsewhere. Greater efforts at developing and cultivating
media literacy , from grade school through college, will help develop more critical consumers of information who will not be so easily duped by disinformation in general and Chinese disinformation in particular.

Deliberately resourced offices tasked with identifying and countering Chinese disinformation could coordinate with and be amplified by public affairs and information offices across agencies within pro-Taiwan countries.

By broadcasting the truth of Chinese vulnerabilities and Taiwanese strengths across multiple channels, Taiwan's allies and partners can blunt the potency of Chinese propaganda and pave the way for a more informed and resilient approach to supporting Taiwan's security, as well as stability across the Indo-Pacific.

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Kerg, USMC, is a nonresident fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Follow him on X @BrianKerg.

This article was first published by the Atlantic Council . The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions or opinions of the US Marine Corps, the Department of Defense or any part of the US government.

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