China Sketches a Plan to Take Taipei Without Destroying It

A study circulating among Taiwan’s defense planners this week lays out, in unusual detail, how China’s military might actually try to take Taipei: not with the leveled-city bombardment many war games assume, but through a doctrine researchers call “all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare.” Drawing on a 2025 paper from a Chinese internal military-theory journal, RAND analysts Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga and Howard Wang describe a plan built around blockade, precision strikes, cyberattacks and “cognitive domain operations” designed to sever the capital’s supplies and information, seize key facilities with special forces, and break residents’ will to resist. The authors frame the goal explicitly as “submission, not destruction” — a capital intact enough to govern, a population persuaded rather than annihilated. Taipei Times reported the analysis on 07.08.2026, timing that coincided with the second day of Taiwan’s live Han Kuang defense exercises, in which Patriot batteries took up positions across New Taipei and Kaohsiung’s airport was fortified with roadblocks. The concept is not yet PLA doctrine, the researchers caution, but it is a rare window into how China’s military theorists are thinking about winning a war over Taiwan without inheriting a wrecked city. That distinction matters for anyone assuming an invasion would announce itself unmistakably: a campaign built around persuasion and paralysis could look, in its opening days, more like a blackout than a war.