School of War - Ep 237: Toshi Yoshihara on China’s Subversive Strategies

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Toshi Yoshihara, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and author of Mao's Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China's Navy, joins the show to discuss how the PLA took Beijing in 1949 by subversion, and how they may yet seize Taiwan.       ▪️ Times     •      01:53 Introduction     •      03:24 Peaceful liberation     •      07:19 Planning and preparation              •      10:36 Isolation     •      17:30 A tradition of manipulation             •      23:51 True believers                •      28:23 Helpless         •      34:55 Political warfare               •      41:53 Surprise     •      47:32 Holy Grail     •      50:51 Fault lines     •      57:44 What to read? Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

A really fascinating conversation today that gets at the heart of what we're trying to do on school of war. Political warfare and subversion are at the core of the Chinese Communist parties and the People's Liberation Army's strategic DNA. Consider, for example, the fall of Beijing towards the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the city was turned over by its nationalist commander after he was pressured to do so by communist agents in his inner circle. The main such agent was his own daughter. Today, we're going to talk about what episodes like this and the doctrine the communists have based on them tell us about the struggles to come and the struggles already underway regarding Taiwan. It is for 504 long. It is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in France.

We'll fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields. and ill street, which you'll never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Toshi Yoshihara, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,

the author of numerous fascinating books about the PLA and China. Most recently, Mao's Army Goes to Sea, the island campaigns and the founding of China's Navy. He's the co-author recently of an article in the Washington Quarterly called Conquering Taiwan by Other Means, China's expanding coercive options. Toshi, thank you so much for coming back on School of War. Thanks for having me. So one of the reasons why I'm excited about this conversation today is I think you do some really excellent work on what I will describe. I'm borrowing this phrase from another person who does excellent work on this subject, Jackie Deal,

who's also been on the show before. But you do excellent work on what I described as the CCPs or the PLA's strategic DNA, which, just to put that in terms that I would understand. understand. So, you know, countries have histories and they have strategic histories, and the history of strategic choices and the way in which those choices have been made in the past, they condition how they think about strategy today. And we could make that case for America. We could make that case for all kinds of different countries. And you've done a lot of work explaining what it might mean in the Chinese context. Today we're going to, we've agreed to engage in a bit of an exercise

on this front and draw some connections between events towards the end of the Chinese Civil War and contingencies we're all thinking about with regard to Taiwan. So would you take us to January of 1949 or maybe a bit before, if you want to track the story a bit back, and the way in which the CCP and the PLA secure Beijing with, I won't say without a shot fired, but without a climactic battle, Beijing is essentially turned over to the communists. What happened and what does that tell us about how the PLA and the CCP like to do business?

Sure. So what I'd like to do, first of all, is put the fall of Beijing or what the communist described as the so-called peaceful liberation of Beijing in the broader context of basically the last year, the Chinese Civil War, and then talk about what actually happened. What did the communists do to take Beijing without having to engage in overwhelming force? So the fall of Beijing is actually a part of a larger campaign called the Pingjing campaign. And the Pingjing campaign, refers to a series of cities in North China that essentially when the communist were able to conquer it would be able to position the communist to have a commanding position over North China and then push on further further south. What's also important about the Pingjing campaign is actually

one of three great campaigns in PLA historiography. So there's an earlier campaign that took place in late 1948 called the Laoshen campaign. And that was when the communists decisively defeated the nationalists in Manchuria. And that essentially gave the communist complete control over Manchuria, all of the resources therein. And then the two other campaigns, as I mentioned, was the Pingjing campaign. And then the third is the Huyahai campaign, which is considered probably the most decisive operational defeat of the nationalists of the entire war. And it's these three great campaigns combined that gave Mao Zodong control of northeast and North China that position the communists then to be able to cross the Yangtze River, which is the dividing line

between North and South China, to fan out and then conquer the rest of South China, like Fujian, Guangdong, and so forth, basically all of the important coastal provinces of China. And that essentially the three great campaigns sealed Chiang Kai Shack's fate, but it also essentially opened the way for the communists to have control of what you might call the heartland of mainland China. In that context and with the understanding that we are at the end of a very long story here, right? This is a struggle that's been going on since, I guess you could conventionally date it back to the 1920s, though maybe you can make a case even further. But of competition between the nationalist and the communists, which eventually breaks out into open warfare, goes into kind of a hiatus is exactly the word you would choose.

I'll let you characterize it, but is on something of a back burner during the war with the Japanese and then explodes again in full, in the late 40s, ending with the communists in control of the mainland. And, of course, the ultimate question still unresolved. We're still dealing with the ultimate question today of what happens to the nationalists and what happens to Taiwan, then sometimes called Formosa in the United States. There's no shortage. You know, there are these sort of stereotypes. You've written a book about Sun Su.

There's sort of these stereotypes of Eastern strategy of the preference of winning without fighting and sort of, you know, an inversion to violence and, you know, an embrace of cleverness to avoid violence. You know, there's a lot of violence in the Chinese Civil War, a lot of suffering, a lot of cities devastated, a lot of cities besieged. It's an enormous, I mean, in terms of, you know, disproportion between American understanding of battlefield events and the importance of the overall war, the Chinese Civil War has got a rate way up there as a massive war that's very important that most Americans, myself kind of included, honestly, don't know a ton about. And yet Beijing, the fall of Beijing actually is achieved with, we'll say, a minimum of violence. How long in the works was the planning and preparation for that? So the planning and preparation for the subversion of the garrison in Beijing

probably began months before the actual activation of the subversive activities that actually took place inside of Beijing. But it would even go, I would say it goes even further because, you know, if you recall, during the war against the Japanese, the communists formed a second united front with the nationalists so that the two sides would fight a common foreign foe. The communist actually used that opportunity to essentially undermine the nationalist

by befriending certain nationalist leaders who might be seen as sympathetic to the communist. In fact, some of the national leaders were actually groomed by the communist and they were essentially double agents since the time that they were young captains and they would rise to the ranks to become two-star operational commanders.

And they still held an allegiance to the, the communists. And so it has to be understood, the fall of Beijing has to be understood in this longer struggle in which the communist tried to infiltrate nationalist organizations to befriend nationalist commanders and leaders who might be sympathetic to the communists and then turn them over to the communist side. And so this is an ongoing, in fact, I would argue that this process of trying to undermine nationalist cohesion actually goes all the way back to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. So, you know, when the common turn showed up to form the Chinese Communist Party and they found these radical professors and so forth who would become the future leaders of the

proto-Chinese Communist Party, you know, one of their first goals was to essentially, you know, form a union with the nationalist, the stronger partner and then eat the nationalist senior partner from the inside out through subversion. And so that was in many ways, the CCP, reason for being from the very beginning. And so in some ways, it's not surprising that the communists would turn to this, what's called the United Front tactics, to gradually eat away the political cohesion of the adversary from the inside. And so we see how the communists then apply these tactics against the garrison commander in Beijing. First of all, I would say the parallels of what you just outlined to the present situation with Taiwan and risks we may be

running with Taiwan should be fairly obvious that we'll get into it more explicitly later in our conversation. But sticking in 1948-49 for the moment, tell us about that commander. This is Fu Zhu Yi, if my pre-show research serves me well. And what's so extraordinary about this story is, I mean, I feel like a lot of listeners are familiar with the fact that the PLA and the CCP are sort of specialists in political warfare. But the political warfare and the infiltration in this case involved his daughter in a central role. And there's just something so remarkable and kind of chilling and sort of characteristically revolutionary about that, that I just want to tee that up because it was jarring to me when I came across it. Yes, that's actually one of the sort of the fascinating

aspects about the fall of Beijing. And in my view, that could potentially influence the way the CCP and the PLA looks at Taiwan as a target. So maybe I'll go through some of the steps that the communists took to take Beijing without a major fight. So the first thing that they did was to essentially surround and isolate Beijing and cut off the rail lines of communication between Beijing and its neighboring cities like Tenjing to the southeast and Zhang Jiao Ko to the northwest. And that meant that, and they also actually did a pretty good job of surrounding the nationalist garrisons in those cities as well. And so what they were able to do was to prevent, reinforce from flowing in or out of Beijing, keeping it isolated from its neighboring cities.

That was one tactic to put pressure on the garrison commander. The second approach was to engage in selective uses of force and demonstrations of force to demonstrate the futility of resistance. The whole situation is absolutely hopeless. And so what they did was they actually used violent force to take Tianjing and Zhang Jiao. to demonstrate what might happen to the garrison force in Beijing if they resisted. They also engaged in maneuvers around the suburbs of Beijing using superior PLA numbers, again, to demonstrate the fruitlessness of further resistance.

In fact, I think they tried to wipe out one of the units that was guarding the outskirts of Beijing to make an example of it, to say, this is what's going to happen to the garrison if you guys don't give up. The third is the one that's the most fascinating, the one that you, you, you may, mentioned, which was the architect of this subversive operation was led by Nierong Zhen, who would later become one of the 10 great marshals of the PLA, who's continued to be immortalized in PLA historiography. Anyway, so he comes up with this plan to basically subvert the garrison by activating the underground network inside of Beijing. And these were, you know, communist sympathizers, secret operatives, a fifth column forces, double-age.

numbering in the thousands in the city. And their goal was to try to not only destabilize the garrison, but also try to reach the garrison commander, General Fu, and try to convince him to give up. And, of course, one of the fascinating characters in the story is none other than General Fu's own daughter. And her story is actually fascinating. So she was groomed in a relatively young age to be sympathetic to the communists.

In other words, CCP agents were fond. following her and her father's career, essentially, as he rose up through the ranks. She was, and she became basically radicalized by the communist in her college years, and then she eventually secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party as a formal member of the party. And then she was given a job as a journalist in nearby Tianjin. And then her husband also was actually a communist double agent. And when the time came, Nia basically activated not only the underground network, but also slipped her back into Beijing to do her work.

And her job was twofold. The first was to sort of just get a better sense of her father's emotional psychological disposition and then report that back to Nyeh and her handlers. And then the second, of course, was to basically keep convincing her father to give up. And it turns out that many members of Fu's inner circle were also either communist sympathizers or were outright communist agents. So I founded my research that, you know, one of the deputy commanders of one of his important operational units was actually a communist sympathizer.

And he ended up becoming a go-between between General Fu and the communist when they negotiated the surrender of the city. So the bottom line there is that the high command and the people surrounding him were deeply compromised. And they also employed different types of human agents. So they sent in a communist sympathize. who used to be General Fu's teacher when he was at this basically military academy in his teenage years. And, you know, in traditional Chinese society, your respect for your teacher and so forth

creates that sort of inferior dynamic where, you know, your former teacher has a lot of sort of intellectual and authoritative sway. And he was sent in there to convince General Fu to give up. And so he was bombarded essentially by people who were closest to him to give up without fighting. And so the combination of isolating Beijing, the demonstration of force around Beijing, and then the subversive activity, even at the highest levels of command, convinced Fu to give up without fighting. And he turned over a quarter of a million troops in Beijing and allowed the communists to seize the city which had a lot of historical and cultural significance intact and significantly boosted communist prestige and also set a precedent for other nationalists units to surrender to the communist. So I want to linger on this for a bit because it's just so fascinating and there's so much to unpack here. I guess the first thing I'll run past you is this account sort of puts me in mind of something I think I've learned over the years, which is when you're young and you're thinking about strategy or grand strategy,

you're sort of throwing these big terms around. You tend to think of it in terms of, you know, big arrows on maps and major macro forces and considerations. And of course, you know, there's plenty of that. But the more time I've spent, you know, with people who are or have been very significant decision makers and you talk to them or you just read their memoirs for that matter, you realize that so much of strategy day to day is quite tactical in the sense of, well, who do I call, who do I speak to? What human, what individual human being am I attempting to influence right now and how? And that's a great deal of the work. And this is just an unbelievable example of this, that it's not just that we've got generally speaking fifth column forces and generally speaking influence operations. And we're going to make their life difficult.

And as we as we tighten the news outside the city, it's no, no, no, we have a concerted multi-step, incredibly intimate kind of campaign plan in its own right to go after General Fu and his mindset. It's quite extraordinary. I don't know if maybe you'll tell me if it's somehow character. turristically Chinese communist or it's just extraordinary. I suppose I'm just sort of gobsmacked by it. Yeah, it is. And I, you know, I think that this tradition of manipulating interpersonal relations, particularly focusing on familial ties, is sort of, you know, a reflection, obviously,

of the communist understanding of their own local environment, things that their adversary values and so forth. It also comes from this longstanding united front tradition. that can be traced back to the 1920s. And so if I could maybe do a little detour, a little bit of a sidetrack, which kind of helps to sort of showcase this tradition that goes back to the founding of the CCP. So one of the things that people don't pay enough attention to

when we talk about, say, Joe and Lai, was that, you know, he got his start as a secret operative. One of his first jobs when he came back after his overseas study program in Europe was to, serve as the director of the political department of Chiang Kai Shack's Huang Pu Military Academy, which was, of course, made possible by the first United Front in which the communist again formed this marriage of convenience to undermine the nationalist from within. And so when he assumed that position, he basically tried to compromise the institution itself by planting communist

agents throughout the entire hierarchy. And many of his best operational commanders are actually cadets of the Pwampu Military Academy. So Lin Biao, for example, who's considered the operational genius of the Chinese Civil War, was a student at Huang Pu Military Academy. He was a communist agent, attending a school that was supposed to train the next generation of Chan Kajek's nationalist officer corps. And so you have stories like this. And one other detail in that particular history is that the person who I mentioned who had planned the subversion of Beijing near Nya Njong-Zen, worked for Zhou and Lai at Huang Pu Military Academy. He was actually radicalized by the communist when he was in Europe during his study in Europe.

He met Joe and Lai actually in Paris, I believe. That's where they began a working relationship as part of a leadership group of the Communist Youth League that they had set up in Europe. So after Joe set up shop there, Nierronzen, when he returned to China, then joined Joe, and he served essentially as a liaison between Joe and Lai and the communist High Command, basically the provincial party committee that took care of affairs in that particular area. And so again, many of the, you might say, the founding revolutionary fathers of the CCP all got their starts in the dark arts.

One of the detail is, you know, Deng Xiaoping, we forget that he got his start as a secret operative in a Guangxi warlord army where he infiltrated and tried to subvert and convince two warlord generals in Guangxi to turn over their forces and work on behalf of the communists. So they've been doing this for decades. And I think one of the qualities that's required to be a master of the dark arts, if you will, is to have this innate ability to read human emotions, to discern human weaknesses, to exploit those weaknesses. through lures, but even through blackmail and things of that nature, to convince these individuals

to turn over. I would also say that one of the things that I began to appreciate more when I read this history is that there's this fascinating intellectual ferment that was taking place in Chinese state and society at the time, which was that everyone had shared the same goal, right, which was to bring China out of the dynastic decay and create a, new China and that, you know, many of these people were quite sympathetic to the Soviet model, right? Because as I recall, you know, the Soviets seemed to be doing very well in the 20s and 30s. They saw the Soviet Union as a model that China should emulate. And so I think many nationalist, many progressive urban nationalist officers, for example, were in some ways deeply sympathetic

to some of the arguments that the communists were making at the time. Because after all, the communist could say, look, we're all going for the same goal, which is the renewal of China, right? And it's just that the key difference here is a difference in methods. And so what they're saying is if you join us, the communist side, we would be able to do a much better job in creating this new China. So in many ways, the allegiances of these nationals officers were genuinely up for grabs. And in some ways, you can make the case that the communists may have done a better job in making that case to to persuade those on defense or on the nationalist side to come over to the communist side. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then on the on the question of the daughter, I'm not sure what you

would say are the sort of psychological conclusions we should draw from from this aspect of the operation. It's surely not the first time a parent has been betrayed by a child in high politics. But I guess the examples that I in my memory that I would go to or my knowledge of history I go it would all be sort of denastic politics where the child has a lot to gain. You know, you basically have members of a family knife fighting over the country, which happens to be the family's inheritance or something like that. In this case, you know, based on the story you've sketched so far, it seems driven really by ideological fervor and commitment.

And it has a kind of religious quality, like a genuinely revolutionary pseudo-religious quality to it, where, you know, that's the duty of a child, you know, is to be righteous in the face of their parent. In this case, it involves some deception. Well, that just goes to the nature of the religion, as it were, in this case. You know, is that, would you accept that? I mean, how would you characterize the sort of psychological dynamics of all this? I mean, I do think that many of the converts to communism were true believers, right?

That they did believe that the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist and later Maoist theory was the answer to creating this new China. And so, you know, I mean, I do think that, again, because of the intellectual environment, the intellectual ferment of that period, these were people who could genuinely be swayed and be committed to that particular cause. I mean, how else to explain, you know, a nationalist, you know, lowly captain who was, you know, convinced to be to serve as a double agent would rise to the ranks, which took, of course, decades to become a two-star general to then, you know, to stay hidden for that. for that long and then finally come out and defect to the communists. I mean, these are clearly people who really believed in in the cause. And I also think that it goes both ways, which is that the communists were very good at nurturing those relationships, right? So sometimes they might lose contact, but they try to reacquire contact and to, you know, let them know that the communists have

been looking out for them. They know their troubles, that they've been cut off from communications and so forth. And, you know, one of the things that I noticed, too, in many of these defection stories is that no detail was too small for the highest-level commanders of the Chinese Communist Party. So we're talking about commanders of these massive field armies who are spending their precious time focusing on some, you know, subversive activity against a particular unit. And that also reflects the fact that it's not just that their targets were to, believers that the communist leaders themselves truly believed in the power of what was called enemy work or political work and the power to change the hearts and minds of of their target

set. So I think there was a kind of a supply and demand dynamic that was going on at the time. And so I was, you know, I was always amazed about, you know, hearing about, you know, Deng Xiaoping when he was, you know, one of the leaders of these field armies would, would form a interagency group to try to, you know, subvert one of these nationalist units. I mean, you know, you have only so many hours in the day, and yet he's willing to dedicate that kind of time on something I think that I think many Western militaries would consider like subsidiary operations. They see this as, you know, working hand in hand with conventional military forces to defeat the

adversary. And so I think that's the other perhaps. insight that comes from the study of this history is that they don't use subversion just because of their relative weakness, because they're materially weak. It's that it's so imbued in the way they think about how to fight that they will use subversion even when they're very strong. And so when we look at the case of the last year of the Chinese Civil War, in the Huai Haiai campaign, there was an attempt to subvert a nationalist unit guarding a river crossing. And the communist commander, basically said, we're now so powerful that we can just punch through and cross the river.

But we're going to use aversion anyway. You know, because it's part of their, you know, it is part of their DNA, right? You know, it's part of their playbook. It's part of their script. It's the part of the way they think about waging war. It's their way of warfare. And I think that has a lot of implications for today, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit later, which is, you know, even when the PLA becomes very strong,

it will still be inclined to use these types of subversive activities to weaken an adversary like Taiwan. So one more question about 49 and then we'll come up to the present, which is, and I don't know how granular your sources are here when you were going through the details of what happened. But the daughter shows up in a city that is, I'm not sure if you'll tell me, it's already besieged or, you know, certainly in an active theater of warf war. And she shows up. And at what point does the father start to wonder what the heck is going to? on here? Like, what is, what is his, you imagine sort of the, I don't know, the phenomenology as he's, like,

suddenly surrounded by all of these people in his inner circle who, like, seem to be singing from the same sheet of music. Like, how does he experience this? How does he react to it? I mean, you know, what he does in the end? But at some point, does it dawn on him that he is the target of a campaign? Yeah, that's a, you know, that's a really great point. And, you know, and I think, you know, one of the things that I realized in reading some of these histories is that the nationalist generals who are being targeted know that they're being targeted. In fact, they even know some of the subordinates who are double agents. And yet there's, in some ways, there's a sense of helplessness, and not much they can do about it because they need to hold together this defensive force,

this kind of unwieldy coalition to defend their position. So in some ways, they've had to tolerate essentially the presence of what they suspect to be communist sympathizers. So I suspect that that might have something to do with General Fu having to deal with people who are who were seemingly talking from the same page. I would note just to talk about sources is, you know, one of the ways to get into what happened is to read the memoirs of the operational commanders. So I got a lot of these details from Nierong Zhen's own memoirs. And he claims in this chapter looking at the peaceful liberation of Beijing,

he says, you know, I've been a lot of battles, you know, up to that point. And this is one of the few times where I had really a great deal of fidelity of an, of intelligence in knowing exactly what is going on inside, you know, the garrison commander's headquarters. He got what he hinted at was, you know, sort of exquisite intelligence based on all of the double agents who were operating on his behalf. He said, I just had such a clear picture. It was extraordinary. And that was, you know, one of the things that he admitted in his memoirs. It's pretty remarkable.

And you were a student of, among other things, how the CCP, PLA, see their own military history and see military. history more broadly, certainly at the middle of the 20th century. Would we expect this episode to be taught in their schools? You know, this guy becomes one of the 10 great marshals. You know, is this held up? Yes. Is the paragon of good, good operational practice? Absolutely. So I think, you know, as you know, all military organizations care about history, care about the conduct of their operations and their past and look to their own past for inspiration. And I think the PLA is no different. And I think one of the interesting things about the PLA, of course, is that it's a relatively young organization. And so the people who had been involved in those conflicts have only passed from the scene not that long ago, right?

And so I think, you know, the relative youthfulness of the PLA, the fact that PLA is a military organization that cares about history combined suggests that they're likely going to look back to the past to inform their future. And in fact, I found that shortly after the liberation of Beijing, Mazodong even said that, you know, there is a so-called Beijing method, meaning that he believes that he has come up with a model, essentially, that could be applied to other places of nationalist resistance. And, of course, you know, because of the importance of the three great campaigns, this story of the liberation of Beijing has been told and retold in PLA, historiography. It's celebrated. Fudong Ju, the daughter of General Fu, is celebrated as one of these, you know, great agents who had worked on behalf of the cause. And so it is a case study that has been, you know, litigated and relitigated in PLA's own retelling of its own past. And I think, you know, the way that I like to tell folks about studying the PLA would be, you know, the analogy would be something like, it would be kind of ridiculous to try to study the U.S. Navy.

without knowing what happened at the Battle of Midway, you know, without knowing some of the climactic battles that the U.S. Navy has sort of organized this institutional identity around, right? And so, like, it would be just as ridiculous for us to try to study the PLA and not know anything, for example, about the three great campaigns that helped to decide the Chinese Civil War. In fact, I've made the case that the last year, the Chinese Civil War could be considered the PLA's finest hour, right? which, you know, it's that short time period when the PLA basically got its way, was able to achieve tremendous operational success, impose its will on the adversary,

and ultimately help to achieve the ultimate goal, which is, you know, seizure of the mainland and the ultimate defeat of the nationalists. So it's hard to imagine that that past wouldn't matter to how the PLA thinks of itself, thinks about the kinds of battles that it would prefer to wage, right, to want to replay some of that script. That's in many ways part of its institutional memory and its institutional imagination. So this observation will start to bring us into the present. But, you know, if I were going to make the case against the, I think very good point you just made, that we need to, if you want to understand the U.S. Navy, you've got to study, you know, the war in the Pacific.

You know, one way you could kind of make that case would be to say, well, the technology is all changed. You know, we don't fight battles. The U.S. Navy is just not going to fight a battle like fought the battles in 1942 through 45 because all the weapons have changed. I think it's a spurious sort of silly argument. Of course, you're right, and that argument would be part of a wrong argument. But I could imagine somebody saying it. With political warfare and the kind of infiltration, espionage, subversion kind of stuff that we're talking about, that stuff is historically evergreen.

It always has been, and it always will be relevant. And I could even make the case, this is a little bit more out in the limb, but I could make the case that it's arguably more relevant post-nuclear weapons in the sense that we all live in a world now where everyone is more hesitant, or more conscious of the acute risks of vertical escalation. So as a result, you know, the availability of tools that might get you what you want while running you a lower risk of vertical escalation,

it seems even more relevant and more valuable. And it would be shocking to me if the kinds of things we're discussing right now and we can get into this whole debate about, whether we should be more worried about invasion scenarios or coercion scenarios for Taiwan. And there's interesting arguments, I think, to go in both directions, but that the Chinese don't have a kind of plan A that involves a lot of this sort of thing or that even if there is an invasion scenario, that there's built into it a tremendous amount of political warfare. I mean, I can't even contemplate an alternative.

I mean, of course there will be, right? Yeah, I mean, in my view, you know, it's a combination as, you know, as you mentioned, a rational cost, you know, benefit analysis and say that this is a tool that could potentially help you achieve your objectives at lower cost. And then if you combine that with this long history of subversion and the history of great, tremendous successes in PLA historiography, and the fact that the PLA and the CCP look at the world through that lens, right, which is, you know, understanding the competition in terms of the political, psychological disposition of the adversary, for example, waiting that much more heavily in its assessments of the strategic balance, I think all of those things combined would suggest that it would make a lot of sense for the CCP. in the PLA to sort of use this this toolkit. And it may be that they might see that its adversaries don't have really great counters as well and that that might incentivize them to use this tool as well because of the fact that they feel that they have an inherent superiority in this particular warfare area. Well, say more about that.

I think that's a point you make in the paper and I think it's a critical one. So we've all been worried. I still, I reserved the right to still be worried about an invasion scenario. The Department of Defense and the U.S. government and our allies and spent a lot of time thinking about it, planning for it. One good reason to worry about it is if you look at what the PLA is developing, I mean, they seem like they're preparing for one. Xi Jinping is, you know, intimated in its direction.

And if you look at the actual capabilities they're developing, you know, you've, of course, seen the imagery of those big kind of Mulberry Harbor-style landing barges, which I joked on social media that, like, maybe they're going to, you know, host a rave there using the process. Imagine all sorts of uses for them. Like, you're clearly building capabilities for an invasion. What do you see in terms of the capabilities that they're building that points in the direction of coercion?

Like, how would you paint that picture? And then, yes, please expand on this point of like what we would do. You know, in the event of an invasion scenario, it's an ugly scenario. But I think we all kind of, anyone who sort of been following it for a while, kind of knows what our playbook would look like. what would our playbook, like the world just becomes much more complicated in these coercion-oriented scenarios, especially if there's a strong dose of political warfare that goes to the heart of Taiwanese politics.

Yeah. So I think, you know, maybe I'll get to your first question by adding a caveat in terms of the argument that we advance in the article in the Washington court, the article, which is that we don't think that coercion, including subversion and invasion are mutually exclusive. Right. And that, you know, it's not an either-or proposition whether China would only pursue coercion or would only pursue invasion. I think our broader point is to say that China has amassed all of these new options that's at Beijing's disposal, that it can actually pose multiple dilemmas at the same time. In other words, what the Defense Department needs to be concerned about is the prospect of coercion and invasion, right? we, you know, postulated that, you know, one of the, one of the sort of beauties of having all of the, you know, this much wider array of tools is that even if coercion, including subversion, were to fail, the CCP could still count on the PLA to pull the trigger or to bring their hammer down whatever metaphor you want or use to crush Taiwan. Now, there are certainly some cost and shortfalls, right, which is that China would basically forego the element of surprise in terms of an invasion. if it basically, you know, gave up attempts to disguise an invasion, right?

Because you would be signaling through subversion and other forms of coercion of your intent. But I think our point would be there, you know, in the not so distant future, you know, China could be so powerful, right? The PLA could be so powerful with all of the tools that you've just mentioned that it could forego some of those benefits like surprise, like deception and so forth, right? And so again, I think we're placed in a really difficult position where even if they were to signal to us that this is exactly what they intend to do, China would have such overwhelming force that they would be willing to forego some of the advantages of surprise and deception, for example. Well, I know you've got more to say, but let me interject there because I want to offer a slightly different angle on that. First of all, I agree completely. It's an important point that these two scenarios, the invasion and the coercion, the line between them is not thick and bold and uncrossable. You can switch from one to the other pretty swiftly, and you make that case well. On the question of surprise, I don't, yes, obviously, you know, a complete bolt from the blue that somehow is obscured from the world,

which seems difficult to me, by the way. Yes, that would be surprise in a way more dramatic than anything you could achieve once a coercion scenario was underway. That said, not every successful surprise needs to be, as you know, but just to make the point aloud, like a complete bolt from the blue. So I think we've learned a lot about the relevance of surprise on the battlefield in the last few years in Israel's wars. And it doesn't have to be, you know, Hamas's success on October the 7th, which kind of came out of the blue, not completely, but kind of.

You know, the fall of 24 with Israel's success over Hezbollah was involved a lot of various surprising actions to include not just the supply chain attack with the pager attacks, but also the decapitation strike against Nasrallah. Like that all occurred within the context of increasing violence, increasing tension. Like everyone knew that something was up on Israel's northern border. There was no question about that. And yet, you know, when they got Nasrallah, I had a, I was told by somebody in a position to know that when they got Nasrullah, one of the reasons they were able to get him is because he was not

actually in his best bunker. And the reason he was not actually in his best bunker was that he thought his war had not yet started. And that was several weeks into an escalating campaign in the north. It was obviously escalating for everyone to see. But Nasrilla really believed, per what the Israelis knew, that we actually weren't really going to cross the line, at least not right now. So you can imagine forms of surprise that are still relevant and that come even amidst, you know,

obviously increased tensions and maybe already existing violence at a lower level. So I just wouldn't, I also think the surprise question is not binary. Yes, I agree. And I think there's like surprise within surprise, right? Because I think the subversion option creates its own set of surprises. And then the PLA can still surprise us by demonstrating willingness to escalate much further, especially if we're inclined to believe that the PLA would not be willing or able to go any higher. So like, you know, we could set ourselves up for surprise even if the PLA didn't mean to, for example. Right. So there are there are different sort of angles or dimensions of surprise. But I do want to talk about the, you know, the dilemmas that the subversion piece poses to us as a way to talk about a different kind of surprise as well, which is that, and it's one of the things that distinguishes it from the invasion scenario, which I think reinforces our argument, that we need to widen our aperture and consider a broader range of contingencies given the options that China has. So the thing that makes subversion so problematic in some ways from the U.S. perspective is that, you know, it would not

have very clear INW, right, in terms of warning, in terms of indications. The indicators of an oncoming, you know, onslaught of subversion that would destabilize how many state and society, those indicators would look very different from an invasion, right? Because, you know, in terms of invasion, we would see movement of forces, logistical preparations. You know, some people have argued that we could see that from a mile away. What's different about the, of the subversion scenario, is that a lot of these things are likely going to take place behind closed doors. they're going to take place behind the scenes, right? Acts of blackmail, acts of, you know, financial coercion, you know, acts of, you know, financial lures, things to shift the allegiances of the adversary are likely not going to be visible to us. And even if they use assassination squads to, you know, destabilize to take out Taiwanese political and military leaders, that might seem episodic or even random to outside observers, right? And so I think that then could then potentially, set a stage for surprise in the sense that what seemed like a slow boil could suddenly accelerate.

And you can see, you know, command and control or the chains of command collapsing, for example, in unpredictable ways that surprise policymakers sitting in Washington. So I think that, that to me, is one of the kind of the difficulties that, and one of the, one of the dilemmas, I think that the CCP would want to impose on us. because I think we, first of all, unlikely to know exactly what's going on. And I think, you know, secondly, I think it would, I think under certain circumstances, we would be unwilling to interject ourselves into the complex social, political dynamics that's happening on the island. And in some ways, that's exactly why the CCP would want to use this option

because they might anticipate that we would have, you know, sort of our hands tied behind our backs, because we'd be unwilling to sort of directly intervene in an issue that we'd do. don't know very much about. And, you know, I think our history of truly understanding even our allies and the complex domestic political dynamics of our allies is not great, frankly, right? And we're not very good at, you know, trying to understand the domestic political dynamics of our adversaries. And so I think it's getting at a really hard problem and that the CCP would be incentivized to exploit that particular problem for us. And thereby, I think, you know, create conditions that might surprise us if we're not looking adequately at this problem set.

Yeah. And you make a point in the paper that I've made over and over again, so I'm glad to see it. We all need to be making this point, which is that, you know, American public opinion on foreign affairs and, you know, interventionism versus isolationism or whatever, it turns on a dime. And it's just, and Korea is one of the best crisp examples of this, where if, you know, you took a poll of America. Americans in the spring of 1950 and asked them, you know, should we fight to defend South Korea? Probably one of the most likely answers you would get would be, where is South Korea? You know, why are you asking me this question? How ridiculous. And of course, by by a few days into the invasion, the communist invasion, the public opinion is quite fervent

in its demands that the Truman administration do something. But, you know, American attitudes also depend on our estimate of who we're supporting. We like to support people who are fighting for themselves. So we like to, you know, that's why Israel and Ukraine, despite all the turbulence, you know remain security partners of of the United States in complicated ways they're the you know complicatedly different ways but nevertheless real ways you know I if the Chinese could demonstrate the mainland Chinese could generate enough confusion in Taiwanese politics they may get them most of the way they need to get they just

generate confusion about whether or not the Taiwanese are actually going to fight for themselves but then surely the holy grail if you're sitting I'm sort of picturing the you know the briefing session for the Politburo or whatever, like, whatever the final stages of decision-making look like, if you could achieve something like Beijing and 49, where you have, you know, what would be tantamount to a turnover would be is if you could have the legitimate Taiwanese head of state basically tell the Americans not to intervene. That would be the holy grail.

Because at that point, you know, how do, even if we know, even if we have reason to believe that this is the consequence of some kind of coercive operation, what do we do in that? circumstance. That's very difficult politically to overcome. Yes, you know, and I think they might be able to take advantage of our one China policy, right? Because I think what underwrites it is this idea that the thing that we oppose is the, you know, violent use of force to resolve the cross-strait stalemate. But what if the subversive acts actually creates a condition in which the CCP can tell the world that actually, no, we have a negotiating partner that's completely willing to, to negotiate terms of reunion, would we really be willing to go to war over that?

Right? You know, we would certainly not like it. But that, you know, but, but, but that would be consistent with the boundaries in some ways that we've drawn from the one China policy, right? And so it would behoove the CCP to try to maneuver us into that position where we would have very little grounds to object. Or they said, look, this is, you know, we are trying to negotiate in a peaceful manner, right? for, you know, Taiwan to reintegrate with the mainland.

But to your earlier point, too, you know, it's a point that we mentioned in the article, which is that what the CCP is trying to induce is the what we call the reverse Zelensky effect, right? Which is that we remember the powerful footage of him, you know, staying in Kiev and say, we're not going anywhere. That had a powerful galvanizing effect. So what the CCP wants to do is to do the reverse, is that if people in the White House are looking at politics, you know, wavering or maybe even operational commanders in command of some of the most important units defending Taiwan standing down, I think what they want those politicians to ask in the White

House is to say, if the Taiwanese aren't willing to fight for their own survival, why should we risk our blood and treasure? And I think the risk there is that there may already be people in the White House, you know, whatever, you know, whether it's this administration or the next one, who might be inclined to want to ask that question to begin with. And they're going to be, would fall into that trap and that they would want and and so the CCP would want to maneuver our politicians into asking those those questions and I think that's that's one of the things that we have to sort of watch out for which is you know you know and I guess you asked a question about what we should do and I think one of the things is to at a minimum have some degree of awareness of this subversive strain in Chinese strategy

so that when they do it and when bad things appear to be happening in Taiwan, that we're not surprised, right? Or we're less surprised. We're less confused and that we're less likely to succumb to the reverse Zelensky effect, which is to say, hey, let's calm down here, right? Let's try to figure out exactly what is going on. Let's not sort of just, you know, accept that, you know, that, you know, Taiwan is over. there's you know there's you know it's you know it's a lost cause and so therefore we shouldn't do anything to help Taiwan i think the more that we are aware of this strain of strategy that might inoculate ourselves from that kind of undue pessimism or defeatism which is exactly where the CCP wants us when you look at Taiwan today at its political establishment its defense establishment what fault lines or vulnerabilities

were you the most in terms of exposure to chinese political warfare i mean i think you know one of the things you know, I've been disturbed to, you know, to read on a regular basis, are these news reporting of both retired and active duty military officers, either pledging allegiance to the mainland or working on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies? You know, one of the things that I don't know, frankly, is, you know, to what extent does these cases suggest that the operational capabilities of the Taiwanese armed forces have been compromised? You know, I can't make that clear linkage. That would be the biggest fear for me, but it's not clear that these cases demonstrate that somehow unit cohesion of some of the most important units have been compromised. And of course,

the number of cases that are being reported at least suggest that Taiwanese authorities are clearly aware of the problem, and they're trying their best to root it out. And just to give you one case that actually gets into this subversion story, which is there was a group of seven retired military officers who were indicted earlier this year for a conspiracy in which they took money from Chinese intelligence agency. And their plan was to create assassination squads and fifth column saboteurs to attack Taiwan behind its own lines while the PLA threatened the island from the front. And that's a classic, I think, you know, CCP stratagem. The leading co-conspirator was actually a founder of a small political party in the Taiwanese parliament, a pro-China party.

And he was just, I think, earlier this summer sentenced to 10 years in prison. So again, like there are these very disturbing cases where clearly the CCP is working very hard on various constituents. But again, I can't say for sure to what extent that this phenomenon extends into the operational capabilities, the battlefield effectiveness of fielded ROC forces. There's this vicious cycle at work where as the balance of power shifts, that is just to say, as Chinese capabilities grow, and in particular, their nuclear arsenal grows, we had Dan Blumenthal on the show and Kyle Baltzer as well, I guess about a year ago now to talk about the, and you guys talk about it in your paper as well, to talk about the role of the Chinese nuclear

arsenal as a tool of coercion as a way of messaging essentially to the first Iowa. that the Americans are not coming to help you. They won't be able to afford it. And Blumenthal and his team at AEI, by the way, are doing great work as well on the coercion scenario. You guys are very much thinking in parallel. That's a really important conversation. But as the balance of power shifts, and as you point out, you know, there are voices in American politics in both parties that are skeptical of, you know, the American interest in Taiwan or maybe even the first island chain more broadly. Well, then this all generates a situation, a sort of psychological situation for individual Taiwanese.

people in positions of influence, they have to wonder more and more, well, will the Americans be there for us? Like, it was never 100% clear. And if I thought it was maybe 85% clear, and now we're at 75 and dropping, that makes it easier in each individual case to sort of start making accommodations or at least hedge and position yourself flexibly. And there's a way in which kind of the battle that really matters is now. And it's playing out on this exact plane that we're discussing. And there's something, as our whole conversation sort of illustrates, there's a way in which CCP, PLA, strategic culture just sort of intuitively grasps that, that the battle is now

and that any kind of violence, ideally, is going to be employed only once everything is set up because it would be kind of as, you know, for decades, they've wanted to reunify to use their language with Taiwan, but would never have dreamed of it because it would have been madness to just attack into the teeth of the balance of power, in the year, say, 2005.

Well, you know, we're in the midst of kind of the fight that matters as we speak, and it's not totally clear to me how widespread that appreciation of that is here in the States. Yeah, I think, you know, that's a really important point. And I think, you know, it's almost become a cliche to describe the Chinese of sort of, you know, not making a sharp distinction between peace and war. But it's a cliche for a reason. And it's really important, right? Because that's how they view the struggle, which is a continuous process.

And I think, you know, one of the things that I worry about in terms of sort of our deterrent posture is that when we talk about things like, you know, quote unquote, restoring deterrence and so forth, is that we might be looking at different things from the CCP. So if the CCP lends a lot of weight to these kind of the psychological, political disposition of the adversary, both in Taiwan and in the United States, I think their scorecard. about their position could look very different from ours. So we might convince ourselves that, you know, if we deployed our carrier strike groups and had this and that hard power asset in theater,

that that would help us maintain deterrence. It's very possible that the CZP draws at a completely different conclusion that this might in fact be the time to make the move because of how they read where we are politically and psychologically. And I think that, in turn, sets us up for, you know, potential surprise. You know, to go back to the topic of surprise, right, which is that these very different perceptions of how you perceive the strategic balance might might lead to, you know, might provide the ingredients for surprise

because we think that we're taking a lot of comfort from our hard power deployments, whereas the CCP might draw the opposite conclusion and make a move. And I think that is another source of surprise. Last question for you. I mean, we've mentioned a number of people today who, if listeners want to go deeper on these questions, They should be reading your own work, of course. They should read Jackie Deal. They should read Dan Blumenthal and Kyle Balthor,

and we could name some others, Matt Pottinger, Mark Montgomery, all school of war guests, of course. But if you really, if you wanted to, what's the best way to learn about the Chinese Civil War in terms of books? I mean, you've obviously written about various dimensions of it, but would you recommend, is there a single history that you think stands above the rest? Or how would you recommend going about that for an English language reader? Yeah, so in terms of English, you know, language, so, you know, first of all, my head is in the space because I've been studying

PLA's operational history for the last few years. And so I, I don't have much to offer in terms of, like, thinking, you know, reading the latest and greatest on PLA military strategy and so forth. But I think, you know, there are two ways. First is to read English language operational histories, which unfortunately there aren't that many. The one book that I would highly recommend. In fact, I can't recommend enough is Harold Tanner's, where Chanquist. lost China. And it's actually an operational war fighting history of the Laotun campaign, which is one of the three great campaigns. And he makes the case that once Chang defeats, I mean, once Mao defeat Chiang Kajek's best forces in Manchuria, the game was basically up for the nationalists. And that,

it's a great story because he goes into great detail about how the communists were able to make this remarkable transition from guerrilla forces to conventional mobile combat forces to engage in battles of annihilation. And so understanding how the PLA learns, how it adopts new doctrine and new technology, that's a really great place to learn. And, you know, one of the things that also emerges from this is our relative lack of understanding of the political commissar system, for example. I think the CCP, when they look back to their past, I think they would not describe the political commissar system as an impediment to their operational victories. They actually give it full credit. They actually say it's because we have this political commissar system that we were able to have this espri

decor, unit cohesion, bravery on the battlefield, this incredible fighting spirit that allowed us to achieve success. And so I think a more historically minded approach to the PLA would help to set a lot of these potential misconceptions or perceptions into context. And then I would also add a plug to many of the really great biographies of communist individuals, communist leaders. So Joseph Torrigian's book on Shizong Shui, or Xi Jinping's dad. I think it's called, I'm looking over across my desk at the book, it's called The Party's Interest Come First. I think that's a really good biography,

Chen Jens biography on Joe and Lai. Yeah. And Robert Soutinger's biography of Huya Wang. I think that, you know, one of the ways to understand how the CCP views the world, also understanding the very complex intra-party debates and so forth is to read these great, great biographies of the leading figures of the CCP. Toshi Yoshihara, your paper is called Conquerying Taiwan by Other Means. China's expanding coercive options co-authored with Evan Montgomery,

your most recent book about all this kind of stuff about the CCP and PLA in this era. Mao's army goes to see the island campaigns and the founding of China's Navy. This has been really great. Thank you so much for making the time. I learned a lot. Thank you very much. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.