Jonathan Walberg
When a Togo-flagged freighter with a Chinese crew severed Taiwan’s TP3 undersea cable this year, Taipei did something unusual: it built a case, prosecuted the captain, and won a prison sentence. Gray-zone activity is supposed to be deniable; a judge’s verdict is not. That ruling should be read as more than a local story about a damaged line: it’s a proof of concept that the right mix of policing, monitoring, and law can raise the costs of below-the-threshold coercion. If Taipei wants less gray-zone harassment, it can’t just call for vigilance — it must pay for it, systematically and for the long haul.
Gray-zone campaigns thrive in ambiguity: actions that are “not quite war” but erosive over time — coast-guard pushes, maritime-militia swarms, “fishing” sorties, sand dredging, cable strikes, and propaganda that muddies facts faster than governments can clarify them. For the PRC, the formula has been clear for years: coordinated pressure by coast guards and “civilian” vessels, layered with disinformation and legal salami-slicing, designed to exhaust and outmaneuver defenders without triggering a treaty response. The near-term effect is friction; the long-term effect is desensitization. Unchallenged encounters raise the informal response threshold inside agencies and cabinets, makes media coverage feel like “old news,” and conditions local communities to treat incursions as background noise. Over time, that drip-drip creates a narrative of normalcy. Maps get redrawn in practice, if not on paper, and it becomes politically harder for Taipei to call out a violation or mobilize partners without sounding alarmist.
That is the point of the strategy: to shift the burden of proof onto Taiwan, sap bandwidth, and narrow the space for timely action. If every incident is “ambiguous,” then every response must clear a higher evidentiary bar, pass more reviews, and compete with other priorities in a finite budget. Meanwhile, administrative precedents stack up: “routine patrols,” “safety inspections,” “fisheries management” that look bureaucratic but function as creeping jurisdiction that China uses to push their agenda. The remedy, therefore, isn’t just more destroyers; it’s more prosecutors, patrol hulls, sensors, and joint law-enforcement mechanisms, to document patterns, attribute intent, impose consequences, and keep the narrative honest.
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