China’s Grey Zone Warfare

Beijing is deploying cognitive tools like simulated audio visuals against Taiwan to demonstrate its ability to fight and win a future war.

About Grey Zone Warfare

• Grey Zone Warfare is a new, emerging battlefield-centric concept defined as the use of coercive measures to exploit the operational space between peace and war. 
  • These measures deliberately stay below a threshold so as not to prompt a conventional military response to alter the status quo, which otherwise would have been attracted.
• Origin: Its beginning is attributed to the Cold War era from 1945 when the development of nuclear weapons meant direct conflicts had to be restrained as the cost of conventional conflict had grown too steep and the risk of escalation too profound. 
• Methods: Grey Zone Warfare is characterized by subthreshold activities, including kinetic and non-kinetic methods by conventional military force and irregular proxies. 
  • Kinetic: It is the use of proxies for on-ground action or change of territorial status quo through coercion or militarisation of disputed features.
    • Example: China’s action in the South China Sea or Russia’s invasion of Crimea 
  • Non-kinetic: These are provocative activities ranging from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, economic actions such as debt traps and sanctions, election meddling, etc.
• Prime Objective: 
  • Escalation Bait: The aggressor country’s small actions could be designed as bait for the other party to escalate, which would then give the aggressor a free hand to respond in kind, legitimized as a form of self-defense.
  • Projection of strength: The countries often show off their abilities. They also aim to normalise disputed territorial claims by repeatedly marking a presence in those regions.

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Techniques Used by China against Taiwan

• Cognitive Warfare: The People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theater Command (PLA ETC) Weibo account recently released a 3D animation video depicting an invasion scenario of Taiwan’s areas in Taipei and Kaohsiung with land warship-based ballistic missile launchers.
• Sustained Military Pressure: China has maintained sustained pressure on Taiwan’s defense and Intelligence forces since 2020, with daily sorties conducted by PLA fighter jets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), strategic fighters, and early warning aircraft inducing wear-out within Taiwanese forces.
• Intelligence Gathering: The UAVs are deployed to conduct intelligence work in the areas surrounding the island. 
• Ideological and Psychological Warfare: Beijing often pushes narratives within Taiwanese territory that thrust ideological choices upon its citizens by initiating public discussions on social media and garnering attention for the Chinese cause.
  • For example, A YouTube video of a Chinese citizen operating a drone to drop cardboard boxes on Kinmen Island had fliers written in simplified Chinese, stating, “Both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China, one Chinese nation. Taiwan’s independence is a dead end.
• Economic warfare: China has taken coercive economic measures, leveraging the cross-strait trade and business interdependence to seek concessions. 
  • Example: China has unilaterally suspended the preferential tax rates for chemical imports from Taiwan, granted under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), as a retaliation against Mr. Lai’s propagation of “separatist” sentiments.