Opinion | ‘Short of war,’ China’s gray zone strategy on Taiwan is gathering in intensity (2024)

The central question for our time, if we are to avoid war across the Taiwan Strait, is to understand how Chinese President Xi Jinping actually interprets the deterrence strategies of the United States, Taiwan itself, and U.S. allies and strategic partners.

What strategy is China now embarking upon, short of preparation for an actual invasion, to achieve its political objectives in relation to Taiwan? And what is the role of deterrence in responding to such a strategy?

The key to understanding Beijing’s red line on Taiwan’s political status is China’s fear that Taiwan will become an independent state, and be recognized by the international community as such, thereby destroying the possibility of unification with the mainland.

This, in turn, is based on Beijing’s insistence that any political dialogue between Taiwan and the mainland must be based on the “1992 Consensus” — an ambiguous arrangement broadly based on the principle of “one China,” albeit with differing interpretations of what that means to each side.

Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in government since 2016, has opposed the “one China” element within the 1992 Consensus. As a result, Beijing has rejected all official dialogue with Taiwanese administrations since the party came to power. The DPP has argued that Taiwan was already independent and so had no need formally to declare it. President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president from 2016 to 2024, took this concept further — continuing to reject the 1992 Consensus, while refining the Democratic Progressive Party’s position on Taiwan’s political status as one committed to “maintaining the status quo.” This position has been reiterated by the new DPP President William Lai who took office last month.

But Beijing is increasingly making it plain to foreign interlocutors that this stance is not sufficient. Far from being relieved that the DPP has stepped back from the brink of any formal declaration of independence, Beijing is signaling loud and clear that its political objective remains to force Taiwan into negotiations on its preferred “one country, two systems” model that it has used for Hong Kong.

Beijing might well be in the process of concluding that Taiwan thinking of itself as de facto autonomous, with the international community on much the same page, will become further entrenched — and irreversible. As time begins to run out (from China’s perspective), we will begin to see a change in Chinese strategy toward the “Taiwan problem.” Indeed, we are already seeing it, with China increasingly availing itself of a multidimensional “gray zone” strategy over the past 18 months or so, a strategy aimed at applying new forms of pressure on Taiwanese and international public opinion to force Taipei to the negotiating table.

Prominent analysts have described the gray zone strategy as seeking “economic, military, diplomatic, or political gains without eliciting a costly and direct response from an opponent.” Others have described it as a “short of war” approach — a combination of political, military, diplomatic, economic and cyber measures where the objective is to achieve a psychological, attitudinal and then behavioral change on the part of Taiwanese public and political opinion.

These measures include intensifying political assaults by Beijing to delegitimize Taiwanese political leaders opposed to unification. They also involve military assets: naval, air, coast guard and other intrusions across the median line, Taiwan’s 24-mile contiguous zone and in and around Taiwan’s offshore islands, are meant to show the Taiwanese that their administration is incapable of defending Taipei’s claims to sovereignty. They also entail punitive economic measures (well short of a blockade) aimed at impeding Taiwanese trade, investment and other national income, to demonstrate to apolitical Taiwanese voters Taipei’s vulnerability.

During her tenure, Tsai already pointed to mounting cyber intrusions into Taiwan’s economic and communications infrastructure, again with the intention of demonstrating to the Taiwanese people the acute vulnerability of their systems to an integrated cyberattack.

For China watchers, there are some similarities in Beijing’s “short of war” strategies that have already been tried in the South and East China Seas, and those being tried on Taiwan. Japan has seen this with the intensity of People’s Liberation Army Air Force sorties around Senkaku-Diaoyu Dao. We have also seen China assert nonlethal coercive actions in relation to the Second Thomas Shoal and the Philippines.

With Taiwan, however, there appears to be a growing intensity across the full range of “gray zone” activities. And those are likely to increase as the DPP settles in for another term, and Beijing’s preferred political partner on Taiwan (Kuomintang, or KMT) looks at the prospect of a cumulative 12 years in opposition.

An embrace of gray zone agitation does not mean China has suspended its efforts to build the military capabilities necessary to take Taiwan by overwhelming military force. Those efforts continue.

And there is no inconsistency between China pursuing these two approaches in tandem. China’s political strategy for unification with Taiwan has always had a fundamental military component. Indeed, these two approaches are entirely compatible if their cumulative effect is to reduce Taipei’s deterrence and war fighting capabilities, as well as its political, social and economic resilience.

Deterring China from launching military action against Taiwan is the cornerstone of a U.S. and allied strategy for preserving the status quo and the wider geostrategic stability of the Indo-Pacific region. The question that arises for all of us, however, is how to also deter China’s emerging menu of measures that remain “short of war” and “short of invasion” but that share the same political objective, which is to force Taipei to capitulate.

Governments across the region and the world will increasingly be required to draw a clear linkage between identifiable gray zone actions on the one hand and a series of calibrated policy responses on the other. The alternative is no response at all — which presumably is Beijing’s current expectation.

In the future, the Taiwanese might choose to engage in a fresh round of negotiations with Beijing on easing cross-strait tensions, new forms of economic cooperation and new approaches to the political relationship between them.

Indeed, all our interests would be served by breaking the 1992 Consensus impasse so that effective dialogue can recommence after nearly a decade of silence. Silence accentuates tension; talking can reduce it. As Winston Churchill famously reminded us, it’s always better to “jaw, jaw than war, war.”

But there is a difference between a voluntary, agreed approach to negotiations, as opposed to a coerced one.

For Beijing, reassurance that Taipei and its international partners will sustain the status quo on Taiwan’s future political status is essential for strategic stability. But with Xi’s evident frustration at Taiwan’s continuing autonomy, reassurance alone will not be sufficient.

It needs to be part of a much wider equation of integrated deterrence that will command all our efforts for the decade ahead if we are to successfully preserve the peace.