In late March, a Taiwanese data analyst posted on social media about an odd satellite image: It appeared that the Chinese military had erected at one of its remote military bases in Inner Mongolia a series of roads that perfectly re-created the roads around the presidential palace in Taipei. The revelation only appeared to underscore the seriousness with which Chinese officials are proceeding with President Xi Jinping’s directive to be ready to invade the independent island by the late 2020s. As part of the research for his new book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century, Dmitri Alperovitch journeyed to Taiwan, talked with multiple high-level officials and national security planners in Taiwan and the United States, and walked the possible invasion terrain to imagine just how such an invasion might occur. His scenario, excerpted here and which he imagines taking place on November 13, 2028, serves as the new book’s prologue.
The winter season in Taiwan—lasting from November till March—is great for surfers. It’s no Bali or Hawaii, as the size of the waves and their consistency may vary, but the Northeast Monsoon, which brings in the cold China Coastal Current water into the Taiwan Strait, where it meets the warm Kuroshio Branch Current coming from the south, is known to form some significant waves. The Taiwan Strait is only about a hundred meters deep—shallow enough that during ice ages and the time of glaciers the island of Taiwan was physically connected to the Chinese mainland; but even in the modern era the 200-mile-long passage—which varies in width from about 100 nautical miles down to just 70 nautical miles and is one of the most vital shipping routes in the world—is known for frequent storms, large swells, and blinding fog and is bedeviled by annual summer typhoons from roughly May to October. Between the typhoons in the summer and the stormy high-wave winter season, there is no predictably perfect and easy time to launch a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, especially with the strait registering about 150 days a year of winds above 20 knots, rough seas for amphibious ships and landing craft. Any landing on Taiwan’s windy, shallow, and rocky beaches during that time is fraught and risky. Which is why, in the end, China decided to forego a beach landing and attempt an air assault on the island’s port and airfield facilities, the seizure of which would allow for rapid arrival of follow-on troops and logistical supplies to facilitate a successful occupation.
The operations planners in the People’s Liberation Army had had years to deliberate their invasion strategy, adjusting year after year as China’s own military capabilities grew and advanced. In the end, due to the unpredictability of the rough Taiwan Strait waters and the heavy fortifications the Taiwanese had built up around potential beach landing sites, the PLA came up with an innovative invasion plan—the opening stages of which they’d practiced repeatedly as the late 2020s unfolded. For several years, China had engaged in full-scale military exercises—loading up vast armadas of military and civilian ships with tens of thousands of troops, equipment, and matériel and heading toward Taiwan, always stopping just short of the 12-nautical-mile limit that marks the start of the island’s territorial waters. They figured they could practice with some impunity, because they knew Taiwan could never afford to respond aggressively. One of the island’s greatest defense dilemmas had long been its inability to respond to hostile provocations and threats with force—lest it be accused of instigating a conflict. US officials had warned Taiwanese leadership for years that under no circumstances could they fire the first shot—they had to take the Chinese punch before retaliating. Portraying China as the aggressor would be a critical step in building the international case that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was alone responsible for starting any war. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: After all, even if the Taiwanese fired first at the PLA armada after it crossed Taiwan’s territorial boundary, Beijing could still dispute the shooting as unprovoked and claim that it occurred in international waters—muddying the geopolitical waters such that Taiwan risked losing key moral and diplomatic support around the world. Too many countries wanted the excuse—they would only be too eager to continue trading with China, the world’s second largest economy, irrespective of the conflict. If Taiwan was to survive and rally the world to its cause, it couldn’t afford to offer that excuse.
The final Chinese PLA plan counted on precisely that Taiwanese restraint when China’s ships entered Taiwan’s waters and closed in on the vital northwestern coastal Port of Taipei, a modern facility completed in 2012 that boasted 4,500 feet of so-called berth space, a substantial amount of space available for cargo offloading. There the PLA planned to leverage existing infrastructure to rapidly unload hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, heavy engineering equipment, weapons, munitions, and the logistics supplies needed for the conquest of the island. While Taipei wasn’t the largest port in Taiwan, the rapid capture of its docks was essential to the success of the operation, since other Taiwanese port facilities were too far away from the capital city. That distance and Taiwan’s extensive array of steep mountains and winding rivers made the rapid transport of a large PLA armored force from any other port or beach to the capital all but impossible.
The operational plan called for moving eight modern Type 075 Yushen-class amphibious assault ships, each with more than 30,000-ton displacement, right up to Taiwan’s maritime border, while being protected by PLA Navy (PLAN) guided-missile destroyers. Xi Jinping’s regime had rapidly constructed the Yushen ships specifically with this mission in mind; each was a highly capable delivery platform for air assault operations, carrying a mix of up to 28 attack and heavy transport helicopters and 800 troops. In the early morning hours, once the final order was given, 200 Z-8 and Z-20 transport helicopters, all backed up by Z-10 attack gunships, would take off from the ship landing docks and head for the Taipei port, as well as the Taoyuan International Airport, 10 miles south, and the smaller Taipei Songshan Airport, located right in the center of the capital city, just three miles north of the Zhongzheng government district. The plan called for helicopters to make the journey in 10 minutes. (Ironically, these aircraft were built based on legally acquired Western technology—the Z-8 came from an original French-licensed design and the Z-20 from the UH-60 Black Hawk, which America had sold to China in the 1980s. The Z-10 was built with Pratt & Whitney engines and assisted by European Airbus and AgustaWestland transmission and rotor installation designs.)
The heliborne brigades of the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) Airborne Corps, China’s equivalent to the United States’ 101st Airborne Division, would assault, capture, and secure the port and airport facilities, in preparation for follow-on forces with armored vehicles that would land at the airfields on the Chinese Y-20 and Russian-made IL-76 troop transport planes. As those transport planes descended, dozens of large roll-on/roll-off (RORO) ferries and vehicle transport ships—all built with “national defense requirements” and appropriated from Chinese industry by the PLAN—would rush into the captured port and unload tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of additional tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Anticipating that the Taiwanese might manage to destroy the port’s infrastructure ahead of the Chinese landing, the PLA has spent years practicing rapid offloading of these vessels in ports with minimal cargo handling infrastructure, such as a lack of pier-side ramps or tugboat support. Simultaneously, PLAAF land-based missiles, rockets, and bombers, along with attack aircraft deployed from two Chinese carriers positioned off Taiwan’s eastern coast, would pummel Taiwan’s air bases in an attempt to take the island’s relatively small air force out of commission before it could get into the fight—destroying runways, fuel depots, and maintenance infrastructure and targeting the island’s prized fleet of F-16 fighter jets. Mainland-based precision-guided ballistic and cruise missiles, together with long-range, truck-mounted PHL-16 multiple rocket launchers and kamikaze drones, would all target stationary radars, fixed weapons platforms, critical command, control, communications nodes, naval facilities, energy infrastructure, and TV and radio transmission towers to sow chaos and impede the highly centralized decisionmaking of the Taiwanese military. American-built Patriot air defense batteries, as well as Taiwan’s indigenously developed Sky Bow systems, troop barracks, and anti-ship batteries were also high priority targets.
Achieving the invasion’s main political objective—the rapid assault and capture of key government installations in Taipei, including the Presidential Office Building and the Ministry of National Defense—relied on assault forces delivered by dozens of fast Type 726 Yuyi-class air-cushioned landing craft (LCAC) racing up the Tamsui River. The wide but relatively shallow river snakes through the mountains that separate the beaches on Taiwan’s western shore from the center of the city and empties into the strait in the Bali district right next to the Port of Taipei; its tributaries pass near most of the key government installations in the city. That geography meant that the LCACs—deployed from the Yushen amphibious ships sitting at the mouth of the Tamsui and powered by large gas turbines and capable of achieving speeds of 80 knots—could deliver a battalion of marines and armored vehicles directly into the heart of Taipei’s government district in under 15 minutes. The one-two punch of the fast boats advancing up the river while airborne troops landed via rotor and fixed-wing aviation at the Taipei Songshan Airport would allow the PLA to rapidly bring the fight to Taiwan’s seat of government. While the PLAN marines captured Taipei’s government and communications centers, the armored and infantry divisions would arrive on the island’s northwestern coast, unload at the port and nearby airport on the other side of the mountains from Taipei city center, and then drive onto the highways that encircle Taiwan, racing toward the key population centers and military bases and hoping to overwhelm defenses. Having exercised each element of the plan for years, including simulated fast LCAC-boat city assaults on the Pearl River near Hong Kong, Xi Jinping’s military generals assured him that the plan would achieve a rapid conquest of Taiwan before the rest of the world, especially the United States, had a chance to intervene to save the island.
Xi Jinping chose November 13, 2028, as China’s D-Day, loading up his invasion fleet and issuing his final ultimatum.
With little to show after years of so-called gray zone tactics aimed at nonviolently forcing Taiwan to choose political unification with the Chinese mainland—tactics that ranged from constant economic and military pressure to social and traditional media influence campaigns to bribing and blackmailing of politicians—Xi had finally concluded that only military force would bring about achievement of this long-desired objective. As the 2020s progressed, Chinese military planners had presented one alternative strategy after another, including a last-chance alternative to an all-out invasion: a naval and air blockade aimed at isolating the island, which was heavily reliant on food and energy imports, and forcing its surrender without a fight. But in meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, war game after war game, the blockade seemed unlikely to succeed. Xi worried that America would undermine the blockade with its formidable underwater and surface naval fleet and air power; he also worried about the economic effects—how the rest of the world would react to a prolonged confrontation across the strait that would surely cause a humanitarian disaster on the island and supply chain disruptions beyond it, ripples that would impact China itself. The United States and its allies might even launch a counterblockade of Chinese maritime oil and gas imports, a move that could paralyze China before its own blockade took a decisive toll on Taiwan. Any Chinese naval blockade was also likely to provoke Taiwan to take the one step it had never yet formally done, declaring full independence and irrevocably changing the geopolitical status quo. And perhaps most crucially for Xi, the approach of laying a prolonged siege to the island ran counter to his strong preference for resolving China’s Taiwan problem in a rapid and decisive manner—to rip off the Band-Aid and present the world with the fait accompli of Chinese conquest and the long-awaited integration of Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China.
Thus, after spending that summer and fall in strategy sessions, briefings, and quiet lone contemplation at Beidaihe (the Communist Party elite’s seaside retreat) and in the party’s Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, Xi had settled on an invasion. As he concluded, if he was to take the step of mobilizing the military, risk a conflict with America, and cause a potential global backlash, it was best to go all the way and try to end it as quickly as possible. Victory, he’d been told by his generals and military advisers, would be swift, and the Taiwanese resistance would be quickly vanquished. They had assured him that China’s decades-long investment in new military systems, weapons, and training would be decisive. It wasn’t even clear to Xi and the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission that the Americans would ultimately choose to fight for Taiwan once they saw the might of the China invasion fleet, once they calculated the price of the war in tens of thousands of American lives. Even if they did fight, the US military was far away—nearly 500 miles away on Okinawa or 1,700 miles away in Guam. “We can hold them at bay long enough while our airborne assault units quickly secure key critical infrastructure resources on the island, and our landing force rapidly crosses the strait and secures the rest of the country to create a sense of fait accompli,” Xi’s top military adviser had promised in the final briefing the previous week. Xi believed the time for hesitancy was over. The time to act was now. As he saw it, victory would be his and his place in history assured; his ascent into the pantheon of Chinese historical leaders would be unmatched.
For the West, the warning signs had been there all year, but the distracted United States had failed to heed them until it was too late. The groundwork for the invasion had begun in the fall of 2027, when Xi Jinping was reelected as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, entering his third decade in power. At 75, he was the oldest Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping. That fall, in his speech to the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party—always the party’s most important event—Xi proclaimed that the next five years would be the time when China would finally achieve its dream—his dream—of “national rejuvenation.”
Taiwan, meanwhile, had held a quadrennial presidential election in early January, resulting in the victory (and May inauguration) of a pro-independence, center-left candidate from the island’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—a political shift and repudiation of the Kuomintang and the pan-Blue coalition that had sought to preserve closer ties between the Chinese mainland and the Republic of China. Xi saw the election as the final nail in the coffin of China’s desire to bring about unification with Taiwan without resorting to the use of force. The relations between Taipei and Beijing had deteriorated steadily since the 2016 election of President Tsai, also of the DPP, as successive DPP candidates for presidency repeatedly proclaimed, “Taiwan does not need to declare independence because it is already an independent nation,” a line that enraged Beijing.
And yet as the warning signs had gathered in the Pacific, the United States had found itself preoccupied—the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles had presented a captivating pageantry of nations, full of soft-focus TV feature stories and host-nation pride. The Olympic festivities had merged into wall-to-wall coverage of another contentious and fraught fall presidential election building up to the November 7 Election Day, a contest that piled on top of 34 Senate contests—including fierce, expensive battles in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada—that had consumed the national media attention. As in many election years, Congress itself had adjourned for the fall in early September, and its members spent much of the summer on the campaign trail.
As was customary, the outgoing presidential administration had begun transition conversations with both major party nominees, but the truth was most of the experienced government hands had left for the private sector earlier in the year. The White House, Pentagon, and State Department were shorthanded, and org charts were riddled with “acting” officials meant to serve out just a few weeks longer.
Throughout much of the year, some of those acting officials had tried to raise warnings about Taiwan. Boeing was finally on track to complete the delivery of 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles in early 2029, missiles Taiwan had originally ordered in 2023. Beijing had warned in a January statement that the delivery of these missiles to Taiwan was unacceptable to China and would present a major threat to its naval forces—something the PLAN had said it couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate.
Throughout late summer 2028, even as the Olympics dominated the news coverage, media reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times had cited anonymous intelligence community sources pointing to significant troop buildups at PLAN’s East Sea Fleet port facilities of Ningbo, Xiamen, Xiangshan, and Zhoushan. Satellite photos showed new temporary housing being built to house substantial numbers of PLA ground forces. (Some pundits had pointed out that the reporting in many ways mirrored the prescient intelligence-community warnings from 2021 and 2022 about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it was a tough year to get Americans to pay attention to an island on the other side of the world.) Open-source satellite imagery had tracked the movement of a dozen of Chinese amphibious assault ships and destroyers from the South Sea Fleet ports to Xiamen, the port facing Taiwan across the hundred-mile strait.
Whereas in 2021 and 2022, a constant stream of world leaders and US officials had shuttled among European capitals and Moscow to discuss Russia’s worrisome military buildup along the borders of Ukraine and to try to discourage Vladimir Putin from launching an invasion, in 2028 Beijing had remained beyond reach. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party resisted any and all efforts at international dialogue—rejecting meetings, summits, or visiting delegations that might deescalate the crisis. China kept characteristically silent as these troubling developments unfolded; over and over again, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson had responded to queries with a simple “We do not comment on internal Chinese national security matters that should be of no concern to foreign parties.”
The morning after the US election—even before the presidential winner was known or the balance of the US Congress could be predicted—the outgoing White House national security adviser held a press conference to announce that the United States had developed “high-confidence all-source” intelligence indicating that China was planning to launch an invasion of Taiwan in the coming weeks. The national security adviser revealed that the United States was sharing that intelligence with NATO allies, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan; she added that China had begun moving heavy weaponry—tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems—as well as logistics such as food rations, water, and munitions to naval port facilities in the East China Sea for loading onto ships. PLAN had also started absorbing large civilian cargo ships and China’s armed coast guard vessels under its command. Meanwhile, the United States was also moving another aircraft carrier battlegroup to the region—the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), the world’s biggest warship, was coming from its port in San Diego and was scheduled to arrive in 10 days, the White House announced, to complement the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) currently streaming toward Guam; a third carrier, officials whispered to the press, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), would probably be able to deploy by the end of the month.
That afternoon, from Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson denied the “White House lies” and proclaimed that “China is a peace-loving nation, and it’s America that continually wages wars of aggression.” He also said that Taiwan remained an internal China issue of vital importance to the Chinese people and that China expected all nations to abide by their One China principle commitments and not violate Chinese sovereignty.
The BBC and French BFM-TV both reported on November 9 that Chinese ambassadors appeared to have fanned out across European capitals denying that China was preparing an invasion. At the same time, the news channels reported that each ambassador brought with them a highly detailed and customized presentation showing the economic ties, trade, and key import/exports between the respective European countries and China, as well as a historic recounting of the One China principle. (The One China principle is a unilateral and not widely recognized position held by the Chinese Communist Party that the People’s Republic of China is the sole legitimate sovereign state under the name of “China” and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of it. The One China policy, on the other hand, is a US diplomatic position of strategic ambiguity on the issue that merely “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China”—but importantly does not endorse the Chinese position.) The ambassadors all privately delivered a seemingly boilerplate and coordinated communication that, should any war break out in the Taiwan Strait, it would be the fault of the Taiwanese secessionist government and their American enablers—a situation, they implied, that it would be best for Europe to stay out of. They all expressed their hope for continued peaceful development of economic ties between China and its European partners.
It was only around 3 pm on Saturday, November 11, that the US presidential election had a declared winner, once CNN announced that the leader in preelection polls had climbed over the 270 electoral vote mark. (Other networks followed suit shortly.)
And then, at noon Beijing time on Monday, November 13, 2028—around 11 pm the evening of Sunday the 12th in Washington, DC—having completed its military buildup and with its forces poised to invade, China issued an ultimatum to Taipei demanding that the Democratic Progressive Party president sign an agreement to voluntarily and peacefully join the People’s Republic of China or face immediate consequences.
It took less than an hour for Taiwan to publicly reject the blackmail threat, and the Taiwanese president spoke on national radio and television shortly after 6 pm Taipei time (5 am Washington time). Four minutes into the president’s remarks, the internet across the island went offline, television screens across Taiwan went blank, and the radio stations went silent. Notably, though, the electrical power stayed on at the Tainan Science Park, where the high-tech chip fabs of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company continued to churn away.
Earlier that night, a phone rang in the Situation Room at the White House, as did another in the sensitive compartmented information facility installed in the Madison, Wisconsin, hotel where the president-elect had set up the transition headquarters. As the incoming national security adviser went to wake the president-elect, in DC, the outgoing national security adviser went to wake the president, replaying in her mind on the way up the stairs to the Executive Residence the years of the Pentagon’s own war-game assessments of the terrible costs of potential war with China over Taiwan.
Tens of thousands of American personnel would be killed within days, while hundreds of aircraft and dozens of naval ships would be lost. In addition, air bases—such as Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni on Japan’s main island, and Andersen Air Force Base on Guam—would be bombed, and worse, ballistic missiles might even target sites in the continental United States, like Naval Air Station North Island on Coronado in San Diego Bay and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the base of the long-range B-2 bombers. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has also long warned that Chinese cyberattacks would almost certainly be launched against America’s energy and transportation infrastructure; this was a conflict that would be felt in every corner of the US economy. And then there was the risk of a nuclear exchange, the probability of which was hard to estimate but couldn’t be dismissed. This was no limited conflict, like Iraq or Afghanistan, or even a large-scale war like Vietnam or Korea.
No, the national security adviser thought, should the president and America decide to defend Taiwan, war with China would be unlike anything the country had experienced since World War II.