China Explores Elevating Cognitive Effects into Its Vision of Warfare– warontherocks.com

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.