Before the Invasion: The PRC’s Most Valuable Strategy

​

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is unwavering in its strategic goal of reunification with Taiwan, an objective it believes can ultimately only be achieved by force. However, a conventional military invasion today would be a monumental risk. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) currently lacks the capacity to conquer Taiwan, defend its own borders, deter U.S. intervention, and sustain a post-conflict occupation without suffering catastrophic losses. This paper argues that China’s most viable path to reunification is not a straightforward military campaign but a sophisticated strategy that blends hybrid warfare with a lightning-fast conventional assault. By using mass criminality, coordinated by transnational actors, to neutralize U.S. forces in the region, China can shape the battlespace to its advantage and seize Taiwan before the world can effectively respond.

China’s Modernization

“War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life and death; the road to survival or ruin.” – Sun Tzu

Recognizing the existential stakes of a potential conflict, Beijing has treated military preparation as a matter of national survival, driving an unprecedented modernization that has transformed the PLA from a second-tier force into America’s true peer adversary. China’s military modernization plan has revamped its Active Defense doctrine, established a formidable anti-access area-denial system along the first island chain (FIC), reorganized its Theater Commands and associated command-and-control (C2) structures, and increased its long-range fires, aviation, and naval capabilities. Specifically in the maritime domain, China created an interconnected network among its PLA Navy (PLAN), China Coast Guard (CCG), and China Maritime Militia (CMM) that dwarfs the combined maritime tonnage of Asian nations. According to a Congressional Research Service report on Chinese modernization, the PLAN has swelled to “over 370 platforms,” with a total battle force of nearly 400 ships by the end of 2025. By 2030, the U.S. anticipates a PLAN of about 425 vessels. The CCG—”China’s second Navy“—also has “the largest maritime law enforcement fleet in the world,” possessing armaments typical of naval combatants, with a reported fleet of nearly 160 vessels. Taken together, the PLAN, the CCG, and the CMM create a dense, interconnected maritime awareness web that supports the PRC across all warfighting functions in the sea domain.

China’s modernization efforts collectively create a regional counterbalance in the PRC’s favor, enabling it to enforce its extraterritorial claims and degrade U.S. deterrence. As a display of China’s modernized naval power, it increasingly conducts joint naval patrols with Russia in the Western Pacific near Alaska, encroaching on the vital American allies and chokepoints within the FIC. It also graduated its maritime C2 capabilities by executing simultaneous carrier operations in three separate locations in the Pacific. With China’s modernized forces, expanded naval fleet, new military capabilities, geographic advantage, and political will to challenge American security interests to maintain a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” could China forcibly seize and hold Taiwan?

Military modernization is only as good as the quality and quantity of forces assigned to a specific theater. While the PLA might be as modern as the American military, China’s desire to conquer Taiwan remains the most significant, long-term geopolitical gamble in over a century. As Russia continues to demonstrate in the Russo-Ukrainian War, a country’s seemingly “modern” military can quickly be chewed up in the nitty-gritty nature of war. Additionally, perception may not be reality. The American military is designed for global employment, capable of operating in any geography and across all domains. While America’s modernization may have fallen behind the Chinese, the PLA may not have the same endurance as the U.S. and its regional allies and partners. After all, China has more long-term threats in its neighborhood than America does. A modern military formation with the best technology is useless if it is not employed. But employment also comes with the risk of losing your potent military edge. Unique to the PRC is the purpose of its military compared with that of a democratic nation’s. Unlike democratic militaries with civilian oversight in service to a country, the PLA is the PRC’s force guarantor. As a political party, the PRC directly controls the PLA. In other words, the Party risks degrading its external force and internal control mechanism—the PLA—whenever it decides to send the PRC’s military into conflict. Therefore, the Party needs to ask itself: How much military force can be dedicated to a Taiwan operation while maintaining its grip on power? How much of the Party’s modernized PLA can be lost before it loses its comparative advantage over its regional rivals? And how much internal security architecture is the Party willing to risk on reunification?

China’s Force Planning

“Keep him under a strain and wear him down.” – Sun Tzu

To successfully execute an invasion of this magnitude, Beijing knows it cannot fight a fully prepared U.S.; it must instead systematically exhaust America’s military and political will before crossing the Strait. Taiwan’s reintegration is only possible through force to achieve Chinese national interests, especially after Taiwan’s 2024 elections. China’s self-proclaimed “Century of Humiliation” provides the nation with an excuse to complain about “foreign encroachment” in the East and South China Seas (SCS) and Taiwan. Its “China Dream” is the Party’s goal for China, defined as “national reunification” and “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” where the nation is a “leading power” with a “world-class” military and a “regional hegemon in the Western Pacific.” While operationally and tactically offensive, its military modernization plan is primarily defensive and strategically centered around the PLA’s Active Defense doctrine. China’s plan, with a strategic focus on sea, air, cyber, and space domains, is designed to achieve dominance over Taiwan and includes “strategic deterrent” and “counterintervention” capabilities to deter foreign interference. China’s strategic requirements necessitate it to simultaneously counter internal and external threats during a Taiwan operation to include mainland China’s protection; maintain Tibet’s and Xinjiang’s internal security; safeguard the Chinese-Indian Line of Actual Control (LAC); protect its sea lines of communication (SLOC); counter U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation; and deter the U.S. and its allies and partners from intervening. China’s amphibious assault on Taiwan requires a total landing force (LF) and assault follow-on echelon (AFOE) of about one million soldiers and Marines. The LF and AFOE requirements do not include domain-specific superiority in the sea and air domains. Additionally, China’s problem set is compounded by America’s Taiwan Relations Act, which the U.S. will likely intervene and contest China’s sea, air, cyber, and space domain superiority to frustrate cross-strait operations. China’s political ambitions drive its military modernization and force planning to develop hard-power solutions because its national interests conflict with those of Taiwan and the U.S.

In its current state, China’s force-planning model lacks the means to achieve its ends for two reasons: it fails to address strategic geography and Taiwan’s post-conflict environment. China’s myopic force design focuses on high-intensity military capabilities for Taiwan’s invasion and U.S. deterrence. However, this design model does not account for continuous maritime enforcement requirements in the East and SCSs. The potential consequences of this oversight could significantly impact China’s strategic objectives. China’s Theater Commands’ C2 structure, long-range fires, naval power projection, and ground-force capabilities cannot secure and hold key terrain to safeguard China’s vital SLOCs while simultaneously deterring the U.S. conventionally. Chinese SLOCs run through the Straits of Malacca, Luzon, Miyako, and other smaller chokepoints adjacent to U.S. partners—Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. Additionally, China’s joint forces lack a force design model focused on the long-term counterinsurgency and population pacification of Taiwan’s ~23 million inhabitants. Its long-term pacification of Xinjiang and Tibet provides a possible military requirement model for extended occupation and incorporation of an angry population. A high-intensity conflict over Taiwan, followed by a long-term insurgency, places China’s military reconstitution post-conflict into jeopardy, especially considering the lethality of modern weapon systems, as demonstrated in the current Russo-Ukrainian War.

Past counterinsurgency conflicts in Vietnam, Angola, Iraq, and Afghanistan indicate that large-scale pacification is brutal. China’s force design is narrowly focused, with little consideration for strategic geography, post-conflict reconstitution, or population pacification. Therefore, China’s modernization model does not provide the necessary military means to achieve its goals in a strictly conventional warfare approach because it does not adequately address geography and the post-conflict environment. But what if China could blend warfare styles in ways that frustrate American response options? What if China could catch Uncle Sam and its Western-minded allies flat-footed?

A Plausible Strategy

“All warfare is based on deception.” – Sun Tzu

The PRC’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific embodies this ancient maxim by masking its true martial intentions behind a veil of orchestrated civilian disruptions. In this hypothetical situation set in the near future, the PRC employs an unconventional strategy to constrain U.S. military capabilities within the Pacific region.

As 2026 drew to a close, the Indo-Pacific was deceptively quiet. America’s attention was elsewhere—consumed by the decade-long war in Ukraine and persistent turmoil in the Middle East. No one in Washington considered that the real threat lay in a wave of coordinated mass criminality about to wash over the region. The holiday season was calm. But shortly after the 2027 Chinese New Year, a disturbing pattern emerged. Protests flared up around U.S. installations across the Indo-Pacific. During the annual Balikatan exercises in the Philippines, several U.S. service members were assaulted, some fatally—an unprecedented escalation. Later that year, the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise in South Korea was marred by unexplained vehicle incidents involving U.S. personnel and public confrontations aimed at military families. By the time exercise Keen Sword concluded in Japan that November, a spike in targeted criminality against U.S. forces and their dependents had sown a palpable sense of fear.

The new year brought no relief. In early 2028, mass protests erupted during the Cobra Gold exercise in Thailand. Then, during Balikatan 2028, a U.S. Marine Corps CH-53K King Stallion helicopter was downed over Palawan, its tail rotor destroyed by a small commercial drone that, video evidence showed, deliberately targeted the aircraft. The campaign of terror escalated further when U.S. service members stationed in Singapore suffered a series of shocking home invasions.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place in late July. With a U.S. carrier strike group and an amphibious ready group participating in the Talisman Sabre exercise—3,000 miles away from Taiwan—the battlespace was finally set. As a strategic diversion, North Korea launched impromptu military drills, forcing U.S. and South Korean forces to go on high alert. The next morning, under the cover of a massive aerial and missile bombardment, the PLA launched a full-scale amphibious and airborne assault across the Taiwan Strait while simultaneously encircling Taiwan, declaring the small island under quarantine.

The American response was paralyzed. Its key naval assets were out of position. Its forces in Korea were pinned down by the manufactured crisis near the demilitarized zone. And in Japan, the two-year campaign of fear had forced American military units into a defensive posture, guarding their own bases and families. The U.S. was caught flat-footed, its forces checkmated across the board, leaving Taiwan to face the invasion alone.

Into the Gray Zone

“He who knows the art of the direct and the indirect approaches will be victorious. Such is the art of maneuver.” – Sun Tzu

This ancient mastery of maneuver perfectly describes China’s potential strategy: coupling a direct military assault on Taiwan with the indirect, paralyzing effects of transnational criminality against U.S. bases. Fortunately, this story is fictional, but it could be a possible future. China is well known for employing gray-zone tactics worldwide. In a future Indo-Pacific conflict, China could use mass criminality—any large-scale, unlawful activity that targets civilian populations for financial or other gain at the expense of national sovereignty, civil liberties, or personal freedoms—as a strategic battlefield preparatory action before launching a short, sharp invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. and China are peer adversaries, with the U.S.’s presence in the FIC threatening China’s national interest of reunification and dominance of Taiwan and the SCS, which China sees as its sovereign territory. A conventional war to conquer Taiwan risks a conventional, symmetrical conflict with the U.S. and its regional allies and partners. However, if China can tie down U.S. forces within each host nation through hybrid warfare approaches, it would enable China to mass effectively against Taiwan. Hybrid warfare approaches—like coordinating and incentivizing geographically dispersed transnational criminal and terrorist groups—provide China with an asymmetric advantage over America. Hybrid warfare blends conventional and irregular warfare to maximize a state’s force application, typically exercised in asymmetric ways against an adversary.

Chinese sovereignty claims extend over the East and SCSs through its seapower, but China has insufficient unilateral naval power to enforce its law universally. So, China uses its maritime militia and fishing fleets—its “little blue men“—to enforce its maritime law within the East and SCSs. Akin to Russia’s “little green men“—soldiers wearing unmarked uniforms acting as militias—the CMM, supported by the CCG, enforces Chinese law while protecting the maritime militia through the Chinese “salami-slicing” technique for reclaiming—conquering—territory, which involves non-military means that confound many nations. For example, the ongoing Second Thomas Shoal encounters and the 2012 Scarborough Reef incident. Through China’s non-threatening civilian and Coast Guard assets, China has slowly expanded its influence in the East and SCSs, along the LOC, and into Japanese sovereign territory.

For China to achieve its national reunification interest, it must avoid conventional warfare with America. China’s hybrid warfare with Chinese characteristics costs them less militarily, induces fear in the targeted nation, and slowly shapes the future battlespace. For China to expand its influence with minimal costs to its conventional military capabilities, it must use unusual approaches, like mass criminality, to tie down America’s forces at their bases within the Indo-Pacific. The unorthodox warfare style gives China an asymmetric advantage over the U.S., one America is not prepared for.

Think Like the Enemy

“Attack where he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you.” – Sun Tzu

Rather than confronting fortified U.S. defenses head-on, the PRC’s asymmetric approach targets the unexpected, softer vulnerabilities of service members and their families within allied host nations. China’s pursuit of reunification is a long-term asymmetric war against the United States. Its hybrid warfare doctrine—a coercive approach operating just below the threshold of conventional conflict—allows it to shape the battlespace at a low military cost. By instigating fear and tying down American forces through unorthodox methods like mass criminality, the PRC can mitigate its conventional military shortfalls and create a window of opportunity.

If China can successfully execute this strategy, its long-held dream of a cross-strait invasion becomes achievable. U.S. policymakers and military planners must therefore confront an uncomfortable reality: the PRC will use any means necessary—legitimate or not—to achieve its national interests. This includes targeting American service members and their families to erode political will and paralyze military response. In this new era of warfare, victory may not be decided by whoever has the stronger military, but by who is willing to think and act like the enemy.

LtCol Steven Bancroft is an active-duty Marine Corps Combat Engineer Officer currently serving as the Deputy G-3 Operations for 1st Marine Logistics Group. He has 10 years of experience in the Indo-Pacific theater.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the United States Navy, the Marine Corps, the Department of War, or the U.S. government.