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 war over Taiwan. The authors’ framework operationalizes China’s new military strategy of “national total war,” referring to whole-of-nation mobilization, and “cognitive domain operations,” referring to influencing the mental space where people and organizations make decisions. Details on both remain sparse, particularly in the context of how they may support the Chinese military’s primary mission of capturing Taiwan.
“All-domain megacity incapacitation warfare” (大型城市全域失能战) describes in remarkable detail how China’s military might capture Taipei by integrating military firepower with cognitive effects. An article from the March 2025 edition of Military Art, China’s leading internal journal on military theory, proposes this idea. The Central Military Commission oversees and approves this journal, and its official circulation is limited to restricted military channels. Because the journal is closely held within China’s military, the article’s authors have liberty to speak in specifics and without varnish as they inject their concept into China’s internal debate on how to plan a war on Taiwan.
Most public U.S. defense analysis and wargames focus on modeling kinetic exchanges during a military blockade or invasion of Taiwan. Studies on Taiwan’s will to fight rely on survey data of respondents imagining how they may react in a future conflict. Rarely do these analyses examine wartime cognitive attacks directly targeting Taiwan’s will to fight.
Understanding China’s strategy is not only important for Taipei. National total war reflects the Chinese military’s understanding of how to fight and win modern wars, and it is at the heart of China’s planning regarding a potential future war with the United States. To understand the impact of national total war, U.S. analyses should measure and model cognitive effects.
National Total War in China’s Strategy
China’s strategy of national total war is not the traditional definition of total war, which Williamson Murray described in 2023 as “unconstrained by limits, either moral or political.” Instead, national total war for Beijing describes national mobilization to build civilian capabilities in peacetime that China’s leaders can then translate into warfighting capabilities during a conflict, especially against the United States.
This strategy rests on the Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental, decades-old idea that modern wars are conflicts between countries’ national complex of overlapping systems, not just their militaries. In the 1990s, China’s leaders sought to increase China’s global influence through a systems engineering approach to integrate and build strength, which they called comprehensive national power. Observing U.S. information-enabled operations in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo War, China’s military operationalized systems thinking by reimagining conflict as between adversary operational systems commanding forces, rather than between the forces themselves. China concluded this “systems confrontation” was the “basic operational mode” of joint campaigns in the information age.
This idea dramatically expanded from operational systems to whole-of-society mobilization following China’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, against which General Secretary Xi Jinping declared “people’s war”. Chinese state media asserted that, to achieve control, all of China’s society should mobilize in a “total war” analogous to World War II, where “all citizens are soldiers, the military is the center of a national war system, and other national tools revolve around the military.” Chinese state media directed its military servicemembers to learn the lessons of the pandemic by making use of whole-of-society mobilization.
These efforts combined aspects of “people’s war” and “systems confrontation” to produce a formal strategy of “national total war.” This requires more than the modernization and procurement of China’s military-civil fusion strategy. Instead, it requires non-military institutions like China’s media and financial systems to coordinate with the military on a national level and deliver effects during a conflict.
According to top officials in China’s top military research institution, the Academy of Military Science, national total war is already part of China’s national and military strategy. It is embedded in Xi Jinping’s Strong Military Thought, China’s highest-level political guidance for its military, and it is a critical part of China’s top military strategy, known as its military strategic guideline. The academy’s leaders explain that the new military strategy would prepare China’s military for “future great power wars” in which “confrontation unfolds across all domains and dimensions through national total war.”
Lessons from Ukraine on National Total War
China’s best example of such a war is the Russo-Ukrainian War. China’s researchers carefully analyzed the war as it developed and derived a key lesson on how, in their view, the United States significantly enhanced Ukrainian military lethality using non-military tools. This includes some traditional steps such as leveraging economic sanctions against Russia and providing the Starlink constellation’s civilian satellite communication services to enable Ukrainian military command and control.
China’s military analysts also argue that the United States coordinated its messaging, intelligence declassification, and cyber capabilities with Ukraine to maximize impact on Russian military operations. A common example these analysts provide is the early public assessment from U.S. officials that the war would likely end quickly. China’s military analysts now argue that this assessment was part of an American strategic deception campaign — a “cognitive smoke bomb” — meant to lead Russia into underestimating Ukrainian forces and suffering operational defeat.
But China knows it cannot simply copy what it thinks the United States did in Ukraine. It doesn’t have broad alliance networks that can impose international sanctions, nor does it control major financial chokepoints like the petrodollar or have resilient megaconstellations like Starlink. And Beijing publicly assesses that it lags the United States in strategic messaging and disinformation capabilities. If it is going to execute a national total war, Beijing knows it needs to continue building civilian capacity through efforts like military-civil fusion.
To that end, national total war is not only a strategy of military mobilization. It is a national security strategy requiring all Chinese Communist Party members to develop capabilities that party leaders can weaponize in a future conflict, to support whole-of-government commitment to the fight. China’s civilian national security officials, such as Minister of State Security Chen Yixin, regularly call on all party members to actively convert “systemic advantages into combat effectiveness” for the purposes of national total war. In 2025, China elevated this guidance by publishing official policy on national security that directed party members to “fight well the national total war.”
Drawing from the lessons of Ukraine and of Beijing’s history of systems thinking, Beijing developed the strategy of national total war consciously so that it can weaponize other national systems to support its war system and produce wide-ranging effects against an adversary. However, this high-level strategic guidance leaves space for China’s military planners to fill in the details on how to translate strategy into operations.
Incapacitating Taipei: The Concept in Brief
The proposed Taipei incapacitation concept targets an enemy megacity as its adversary system. Although the authors never specify Taipei, they make implicit references to conducting operations “while simultaneously guarding against intervention by the strong enemy” — referring to potential U.S. intervention — as well as claims to China’s supporting “facts, legal legitimacy, and emotional resonance” for seizing control of the city, pointing to an attack on Taiwan.
By framing their proposal around “incapacitation,” the concept authors reveal that their object is submission, not destruction. China has historically described “incapacitation warfare” as using non-kinetic, body-targeting means such as sonic and laser weapons to subdue enemy troops without killing them. The proposed campaign to incapacitate Taipei broadens the list of targets to include enemy cities and their residents, using cognitive attacks. The authors claim this model of warfare “does not aim for the total occupation of the city or mass annihilation of enemy forces; rather, it achieves its operational objectives by degrading the megacity’s enabling functions and striking key nodes within the enemy’s operations system.” This approach attempts to minimize for Beijing the cost of claiming Taipei, but it appears much less concerned about collateral damage inflicted on Taiwan.
The concept’s authors describe three basic lines of effort to incapacitate Taipei: blockade, precision strike, and cognitive attack.
First, military blockade of Taipei would sever the flow of supplies and information to the city. To disrupt supplies, China’s military would block external aid with siege tactics and attempt to strike aid en route. To disrupt information flows, China’s military would conduct precise “hard” or kinetic strikes on Taipei’s command centers and communication hubs while using “soft” or non-kinetic means such as jamming, cyberattacks, Distributed Denial of Service attacks, and AI deepfakes to degrade Taipei’s military information systems, civilian news networks, and social media services.
Second, precision (kinetic) strikes would destroy Taipei’s ability to enable or support military operations. China’s unmanned platforms and special operations forces would conduct decapitation strikes targeting enemy commanders, key facilities, and critical equipment operators. Special forces should seize, by force or bribery, any facilities that can support China’s forces after landing, such as power grids and maintenance depots. China’s long-range artillery and special operations forces would strike civilian infrastructure supporting military forces and operations, such as airport runways, electrical substations, sewage treatment plants, and facility backup systems. The concept authors caution against striking targets difficult to rebuild post-conflict, such as air traffic control towers, power plants, and reservoirs, to enable future Chinese occupation of Taiwan.
Third, cognitive attacks would amplify Chinese propaganda intended to convince the people of Taiwan that Beijing’s cause is just, as well as accuse Taiwan’s leaders of malfeasance. This approach would create “information bubbles and echo chambers” to separately target Taipei’s military and civilian populations using algorithmic content delivery, deepfakes, and “information munitions” that the authors say are “hidden within videos and images on platforms such as Meta and TikTok.” In their view, these cognitive attacks, with aggressors already embedded in social media used in Taiwan and the United States, will collectively erode Taipei’s will to resist and “ultimately facilitate a rapid cessation of hostilities,” making it the “optimal means” for seizing Taipei.
U.S. analysis and wargames often underexplore this blending of kinetic and cognitive effects, but they shouldn’t. In China’s military, these are old ideas. In the early 2000s, China’s “Three Warfares” approach developed ideas for online public opinion warfare. China’s military researchers at their main influence operations unit, Base 311, even published how-to guides for blending into Facebook groups in 2018. Moreover, China has worked to turn these ideas into capabilities, starting in 2018 with social media manipulation against Taiwan’s election, and more recently against Vietnam. By giving a leading role to cognitive operations, this operational concept shows how some of China’s military strategists are making progress integrating cognitive effects into military planning.
Systems, Targets, and Integration
U.S. and Taiwanese analysts should take this concept seriously. It was published in the leading internal journal overseen by the Central Military Commission, and it is clearly aligned with China’s highest-level military strategy. Its authors lend it further credibility. They include Lt. Col. Li Hengrui and Senior Col. Cheng Jinming, researchers at the Academy of Military Science, as well as Lt. Col. Wang Haiyuan, an instructor at the People’s Armed Police Command College. Cheng leads a research institute within the Academy of Military Science and in 2013 published a textbook on combined offensive operations. Co-authorship with the People’s Armed Police is notable given the population management role it plays within China – a role it could potentially serve in Taiwan.
While this operational concept is not official doctrine, U.S. and Taiwanese analysts should not dismiss it as an outlandish proposal by an ambitious researcher. All-domain megacity incapacitation warfare is an important and rare glimpse into Chinese military operational thinking as they develop under the strategy of national total war. It is one proposed vision for applying China’s military strategy and reveals how some in Beijing think about modern warfare.
First, the authors reimagine the core target of systems confrontation from information flows to cognitive effects. Traditionally, “systems confrontation” sought to paralyze information nodes in a military operations system. An enemy military loses because it lacks the necessary information to operate. The authors’ framework instead adopts simple logic: Fighting a war short of total annihilation means that the adversary should accept defeat, and thus warfare should gear toward cognitively engineering this defeat in adversary leaders. The concept presents a way for Beijing to secure Taipei’s rapid surrender — by breaking Taipei’s will to fight. Traditional military operations would primarily serve to achieve those cognitive effects. By seeking a victory through cognitive submission, rather than physical destruction, Beijing aims to avoid the costs of a protracted war, occupation, and potential counterinsurgency.
Second, the authors envision the entire city of Taipei as a system to target, dramatically expanding the list of legitimate targets. Generally speaking, “systems confrontation” avoids striking civilian targets to minimize collateral damage and escalation, narrowing the list of targets to military or dual-use physical and information channels. The proposed campaign, however, targets the communications channels and facilities connecting the people in Taipei to the outside world from the outset of conflict, as complete information control is necessary to suppress disruption to the concept’s intended cognitive effects. This is an old idea given new life by authors setting it on equal footing with kinetic effects.
Third, the authors propose that non-military capabilities should support China’s military. Within the authors’ framework, cognitive effects are equally important as military firepower, and Chinese civilians are responsible for delivering those cognitive effects. The authors indicate that a national-level policy coordination system, which serves as “an important vehicle for systems confrontation under modern warfare conditions,” should lead cognitive efforts. The “integrated national strategic system and capabilities” would coordinate between military and civilian forces to “reshape ideas” in favor of China’s narratives. This integrated body would be instrumental in incapacitating Taipei by effectively disseminating China’s narrative through “diverse, accessible, and engaging media formats,” thus enabling China to dominate the war’s narrative and persuade Taiwan’s servicemembers and civilians to accept China’s ideals.
These are aspirational goals, but they are not necessarily distant ones. China’s integrated national strategic systems and capabilities remain a work in progress, and it has yet to demonstrate the whole-of-nation coordination necessary to execute any form of national total war, including this concept. However, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan issued in early 2026 makes developing the necessary strategic capabilities a priority. Two important benchmarks for evaluating whether the broader Chinese military adopts this operational concept will be evidence of incorporation into future Taiwan-focused exercises and continued investments in the cognitive warfare capabilities these authors envision.
National Total War Against the United States
While all-domain incapacitation warfare aims first at Taipei, no concept is single-use. Its most important contribution is in describing specifically how China might execute national total war by integrating military and civilian resources to deliver combined kinetic and cognitive effects. It establishes a logic for operationalizing China’s military strategy that might also shape how Beijing plans to fight a potential future war against the United States.
China’s planners are already considering how a national total war against the United States would unfold. In the military journal China Military Science, researchers openly describe how victory against the United States requires “accumulating the advantages of total war.” They explain further how a national integrated system can leverage tools like cognitive effects to “fracture the hegemonic system, thereby alleviating pressure on our primary theater of operations.”
China’s cognitive effects target more than command-and-control systems. Under the national total war strategy, civilians are the target of China’s “information munitions” embedded within social media platforms. These cognitive attacks aim to manipulate perceptions, erode social cohesion, support China’s narratives, and induce surrender. Moreover, these challenges will grow as China’s military concepts mature and AI technologies make available new techniques and avenues to target civilians using cognitive effects.
All-domain megacity incapacitation warfare is one idea among many in China’s broader effort to secure victory through psychological assault on civilians. As China’s military continues to refine its concepts and methods for delivering cognitive effects, the United States and Taiwan will need to reimagine what countering such an attack would require. Taiwan should consider how to defend major media and communications facilities in addition to traditional military and government sites. Similarly, U.S. efforts to support Taiwan should actively prioritize measures that bolster societal resilience against cognitive attacks. Furthermore, the United States and potential coalition partners should consider how to defend aid deliveries to the island under Chinese kinetic attack.
Making these decisions requires substantial analysis tailored to the problem. To that end, more U.S. analysts should incorporate cognitive effects into their wargames, analyses, and considerations for future policy. U.S. policymakers learning from those games should refuse to assume will to fight is a static input and insist on adjudicating cognitive effects on military, civilian, and political leadership throughout the games. More U.S. analyses should incorporate actors such as Taiwan’s All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency, and effects such as the indicators of societal resilience produced at National Taiwan University. These organizations and their work should be a staple of wargames, not a special focus.
Finally, U.S. defense officials should consider how this form of warfare could play out beyond Taipei. Taiwan is at greater risk, but it is not the only target.
Howard Wang is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and holds degrees in international affairs and philosophy.
Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, where he focuses on Asian security issues. He holds degrees in international affairs and Chinese language.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
