America’s Strategy for Dealing with the China Threat Is Outdated

S ome U.S. military leaders believe that China could plan an assault on Taiwan as early as 2026. A special committee of Congress is reviewing U.S. preparations for conflict. While the U.S. and like-minded countries should address Beijing’s capabilities and note its stated intentions, we also should acknowledge that the PRC would find it challenging to change the status quo by force. China’s military forces and weapons are untested in war. Taiwan has sophisticated defensive capabilities. And while it is likely that the U.S. and other military powers would render assistance, no powers are capable of meaningful military support to the PRC. Further, the PRC faces daunting economic, social, and demographic challenges that would come under significant stress in war.

As we prepare for a war that might not come, though, we should face down Beijing’s efforts to undermine Taiwan and the western Pacific by other means. The diplomatic framework between the U.S., Taiwan, and the PRC developed over 50 years through a series of communiques and interpretations and is predicated on changes to the status quo by force. What about attempts by the PRC to change Taiwan’s status through actions other than war? Is our diplomacy up to that challenge?

This doesn’t take any imagination. The PRC already is engaged in military and other operations short of war to change geopolitical circumstances. Taiwan’s top envoy to the U.S., Hsiao Bi-Khim, zeroed in on that when she joined the front-running Democratic Progressive Party ticket as a vice-presidential candidate for next January’s election. Hsaio rightly noted that “the whole world hopes that the status quo . . . will be maintained,” but “it has been constantly subjected to unilateral changes from the other side.”

Those changes fall into the area of so-called PRC gray-zone tactics, which the RAND corporation defines as “as coercive . . . government geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber and information operations activities beyond regular diplomatic and economic activities and below the use of kinetic military force.” Some of the PRC gray-zone activities are obvious and well understood. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing created a debt trap for Sri Lanka and, without firing a shot, secured the Hambantota port at 15,000 acres of land on a strategic crossroads between the Malacca Straits and the Suez Canal. BRI agreements with governments across Africa for mining and other facilities will lead to similar outcomes.

The PRC also has weaponized water and made neighboring countries vassal-like states. China has built eleven dams on the upper Mekong River to control the river’s 3,000-mile route through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. More dams are planned. About half of Lao government debt is owed to the PRC. China has changed the status quo in this fashion and the world has barely reacted.

Slow-rolling the world into accepting a new reality is the PRC’s superpower. Over the past decade, Beijing has created military installations throughout the East and South China sea by building islands — after first denying that was even happening — and then militarizing those islands, after acknowledging that they’d built them but denying that they were for military purposes. The CCP now has military capabilities that could threaten Taiwan, capabilities that it didn’t have a decade ago. Doesn’t that change the status quo?

A military tribunal at The Hague in 2016 ruled that these actions, together with intrusion by Chinese navy and merchant fleets into territorial waters of the Philippines and other countries, have no standing in international law. It was a damning ruling, oft-cited by the U.S. and its allies. So what? Beijing has military bases it didn’t used to have.

The PRC also uses technology to advance its objectives. To spread its messages and enhance its profile around the world, the government employs social-media influencers on platforms banned in China. They use the platforms to obfuscate China’s human-rights record and push Beijing’s version of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Countless social-media users around the world are being fed disinformation, and it is a primary tool of CCP gray-zone activity.

Diplomacy has not kept up with these tactics. Embedded in the language and interpretations of the so-called one-China policy are the principles that the U.S. acknowledges that Taiwan is part of the PRC and neither side may change the status quo by force. But we shouldn’t be frozen by inaction if Beijing takes provocative actions that are short of war though technically consistent with current diplomatic niceties.

For instance, would the U.S. and the world accept the risk of direct military confrontation with the PRC were Beijing to begin to threaten or even to occupy the various Taiwan-controlled islands in the Taiwan Strait and in the surrounding South China Sea? The Asia Society earlier this year published a thoughtful paper on the challenges that such a strategy could present.

What if the PRC, using unmarked military vessels, began to place unarmed or lightly armed forces on Taiwan itself? What if the PRC began enforcing its security laws against Taiwan diplomats abroad? In Beijing’s view, ROC citizens are citizens of the PRC and subject to its laws. How would the U.S. and the world respond to PRC apprehension or detention of Taiwan diplomats abroad? This possibility may sound far-fetched, but couldn’t Beijing simply emphasize that the U.S. and others already acknowledge Taiwan as part of China after all. So why shouldn’t Taiwanese be subject to Chinese law? There are many examples of the PRC’s extraterritorial apprehension of individuals who were born in China but were not PRC citizens.

As outlandish as these and other actions may sound, not long ago we would have said the same about military facilities built on landfill in the territorial waters of other Pacific nations; about the takeover of Hong Kong, in clear abrogation of Beijing’s handover treaty commitments; and about the apprehension — it happens now with increasing frequency — of executives of global companies operating in China.

We should counter these activities when and where we choose to, with deterrence tactics that include cyber, diplomatic isolation, information operations, and other means. Also, as a minimum, we must reinterpret the concept of “by force” in our current diplomatic frameworks.

The House select committee on China should be pressing the executive branch on whether U.S. diplomacy reflects the current reality. Congress long has been a backstop against attempts by presidents of both parties since Richard Nixon to water down the U.S. government’s interpretations of PRC intentions. The Taiwan Relations Act, the codification of the six assurances, and the funding for military modernization of Taiwan are the legacies of bipartisan congressional majorities over many decades. In the era of PRC gray-zone adventurism, it’s time to look at whether our decades-old diplomacy is fitting to this very different time.