Yen-ting Lin
The escalating tensions across Taiwan are not isolated provocations—they are calculated maneuvers in China’s evolving blueprint for hybrid warfare. Unlike traditional military campaigns, this strategy seeks to conquer Taiwan without destroying its infrastructure or economy, aiming instead to coerce submission under a pretense of “peaceful” unification.
China’s approach to this “war without harm” involves a systematic five-phase strategy: sabotaging critical infrastructure, waging cognitive warfare through disinformation, conducting cyber-physical convergence attacks, employing military encirclement, and leveraging political subversion. Recent incidents, including the Matsu cable sabotage and disinformation campaigns during Taiwan’s 2024 elections, provide a glimpse of what future efforts to destabilize Taiwanese defense and erode public trust might look like. The attacks represent more than just scattered provocations among the typical ebb and flow of cross-Strait relations—they constitute a new model for hybrid warfare, one designed to neutralize Taiwan’s ability to resist while preserving its value as an economic and strategic asset.
Here’s how a Taiwan conflict might play out under this new hybrid warfare paradigm:
Phase One: Cutting Taiwan Off from the World via Infrastructure Sabotage
The first phase involves operations that leverage non-military and proxy actors, such as state-aligned civilian vessels, to target infrastructure in such a way that creates a classic ‘gray zone’ dilemma for Taiwanese policymakers. To respond risks escalating tensions and alienating international support, as any retaliation can be framed as aggression against non-combatants. Conversely, failing to respond allows China to continue disrupting Taiwan’s critical systems unchecked. This strategic ambiguity is central to China’s hybrid warfare strategy, enabling significant disruption while evading direct attribution.
Documented incidents attest to how this strategy is neither isolated nor unprecedented. In February 2023, Chinese vessels severed cables near the Matsu Islands, leaving residents and businesses without internet access for over 50 days . A similar operation in January 2025 targeted the Trans Pacific Express Cable System, with Chinese-linked entities concealing their involvement through sophisticated vessel-tracking obfuscation. The operations align with a broader global pattern of infrastructure sabotage, as seen in the 2024 Baltic Sea attacks, where China-linked vessels disrupted European undersea networks to gain strategic leverage without triggering conventional retaliation.
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