Total War on Taipei: China Explores Elevating Cognitive Effects into Its Vision of Warfare

In March 2025, China’s military researchers published a concept describing how to rapidly capture and subdue the city of Taipei. Distributed in restricted military channels, this approach argues Beijing can achieve victory “by blocking the city’s ability to receive external assistance, restricting its ability to enable operations, breaking its operational system, collapsing cognitive cohesion, and eliminating its ability to recover.” Its objective is to break the Taiwan people’s will to fight.While this concept is not yet doctrine, it is an important and rarely seen example of how China’s military strategy and research inform the way it plans to fight a

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