.Americans may not even know that China has struck the first blow until months after it has occurred... Americans think China's war planners think like America's war planners. Unfortunately, the Chinese ones do not. First strikes, despite what former intelligence officials believe, do not have to look like the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Chinese doctrine is different, something evident from Unrestricted Warfare, the 1999 book by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, then two Chinese air force colonels.
So what would China's first attack on Taiwan look like? Say, six months before an invasion China, violating the Biological Weapons Convention, could release a deadly pathogen on Taiwan.
China's National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of "specific ethnic genetic attacks." Pathogens can now be designed to infect specific groups and even specific individuals.
A regime monstrous enough to kill millions around the world [with COVID-19: the Chinese Communist Party pressured other countries to take arrivals from China without restriction while locking down Chinese territory] is surely monstrous enough to release, as the first act in a conflict, a disease on the 23.9 million people of Taiwan. It could take the Pentagon months to realize that China had started a war to annex the island republic.
I suspect Chinese ruler Xi Jinping would not be overly upset if Taiwan were a smoking radioactive slab as long as it were part of the People's Republic of China.
"The biggest problem with the 'China Hands' of the U.S. intelligence community is their inability to place themselves into the mindset of the Communist Party and its Central Military Commission, in other words, to think like the enemy. There is still too much mirror-imaging going on....." — James Fanell, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, to Gatestone, in response to the Culver report, October 2022.
The article concludes with these words:
Why? The condition of a conquered Taiwan does not really matter to the Communist Party. It wants democratic Taiwan principally because the island republic represents a direct challenge to its core narrative that the Chinese people cannot govern themselves. Although most people in Taiwan do not self-identify as Chinese, their democracy, in the eyes of Communist Party leaders, is an existential threat to their rule.
The People's Republic of China for decades has threatened nuclear strikes against Taiwan or countries coming to its assistance. In fact, Beijing has increased the frequency of such warnings since July of last year, when it proclaimed it would incinerate Japan. After that threat, it has promised destruction to all others coming to Taiwan's aid. If Vladimir Putin uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and gets away with it — a distinct possibility — Xi Jinping might think he can also launch nukes.
None of this is to say that Beijing will definitely resort to these means to take Taiwan. It is to say, however, that Culver's optimistic we-will-see-it-coming line of thinking looks incorrect.
"The biggest problem with the 'China Hands' of the U.S. intelligence community is their inability to place themselves into the mindset of the Communist Party and its Central Military Commission, in other words, to think like the enemy," James Fanell of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy told Gatestone, in response to the Culver report. "There is still too much mirror-imaging going on and not enough willingness to think out of the box."
Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, is correct. Americans make assumptions about the Chinese style of warfare; some of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong.
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Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
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