China’s military practice runs near Taiwan set another record this week. China’s air force sent a total of 18 bombers into the airspace around Taiwan on Tuesday:

A total of 29 PLA warplanes and three warships were detected around Taiwan in the 24 hours to 6am on Tuesday, the island’s defence ministry said.

Of these, an unprecedented 18 H-6 bombers and one J-11 fighter jet entered Taiwan’s southwestern air defence zone.

A Y-8 anti-submarine and a Y-8 tactical reconnaissance aircraft also crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, according to the ministry statement which included a PLA flight path chart.

This flight came just a few days after Chinese state media reported on PLA Marines practicing their amphibious assault skills.

The Chinese military is enhancing its amphibious combat skills and command efficiency, a recent landing exercise aired by state broadcaster CCTV indicates.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corps exercise showcased the capabilities of a combined arms battalion, as troops tried out multiple types of weapons, equipment and combat models, according to the report on Thursday.

PLA Navy Marine Corps are expected to be a key force if Beijing decides to seize self-governed Taiwan, which it sees as breakaway territory to be reunited by force if necessary.

All of this supports what Taiwan’s foreign minister told the Guardian over the weekend: China is just looking for pretexts to continue practicing an invasion.

Taiwan’s government believes China is preparing to find another “pretext for practising their future attack” on the island, its foreign minister has said, after a record-breaking year of military threats and incursions…

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Taipei, [Joseph] Wu said the Chinese military threat was “getting more serious than ever”, with a five-fold increase in warplane incursions into Taiwan’s defence zone since 2020…

The minister said it was not just China’s military efforts that were ramping up, but a “combination of pressures”, including economic coercion, cyber-attacks, cognitive and legal warfare, and diplomatic efforts to have Taiwan isolated internationally.

China’s military moves are obvious and I know what cyber-attacks and economic coercion are, but I wasn’t familiar with the phrase “cognitive warfare.” Fortunately there a really good piece in the Atlantic today which explains what that is and how China has been using it against Taiwan.

In 2018, a typhoon stranded thousands of people at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, Japan. Among them were some tourists from Taiwan. Normally, this story might not have had much political meaning. But a few hours into the incident, an obscure Taiwanese news website began reporting on what it said was the failure of Taiwanese diplomats to rescue their citizens. A handful of bloggers began posting on social media, too, excitedly praising Chinese officials who had sent buses to help their citizens escape quickly. Some of the Taiwanese tourists supposedly had pretended to be Chinese in order to get on board. Chatter about the incident spread. Photographs and videos, allegedly from the airport, began to circulate.

The story rapidly migrated into the mainstream Taiwanese media. Journalists attacked the government: Why had Chinese diplomats moved so quickly and effectively? Why were the Taiwanese so incompetent? News organizations in Taiwan described the incident as a national embarrassment, especially for a country whose leaders proclaim they have no need for support from China. Headlines declared, “To Get on the Bus, One Has to Pretend to Be Chinese,” and “Taiwanese Follow China Bus.” At its peak, the angry coverage and social-media attacks became so overwhelming that a Taiwanese diplomat, apparently unable to bear the deluge of commentary and the shame of failure, died by suicide.

Subsequent investigations turned up some strange facts. Many of the people who had been posting so prominently and with such enthusiasm about the incident were not real; their photographs were composite images. The obscure website that first promoted the story turned out to be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. The videos were fake. Strangest of all, the Japanese government confirmed that there had been no Chinese buses, and thus no special Taiwanese failure at all. But this semblance of failure had been pounced upon by journalists and news anchors, especially by those who wanted to use it to attack the ruling party. This, clearly, was what Chinese propagandists had intended. The anonymity of social media, the proliferation of “news” sites with unclear origins, and, above all, the hyper-partisan nature of Taiwanese politics had been manipulated in order to push one of the Chinese regime’s favorite narratives: Taiwanese democracy is weak. Chinese autocracy is strong. In an emergency, Taiwanese people want to be Chinese.

You can follow that link above to read more about this story. A Taiwanese diplomat really did kill himself over this but it turns out the Chinese version of the story was entirely fake. There were buses sent to help the tourists but all of them were provided by Japan. China then issued various press releases basically claiming that they had prompted Japan to send the buses or maybe that China had sent extra buses.

Ultimately the bus story is just a blip but over time many stories like that one could lead some people in China to believe that no one sees Taiwanese citizenship as valuable or even make some Taiwanese people question it’s value.

Sometimes Chinese pressure on Taiwan has been military, involving the issuing of threats or the launching of missiles. But in recent years, China has combined those threats and missiles with other forms of pressure, escalating what the Taiwanese call “cognitive warfare”: not just propaganda but an attempt to create a mindset of surrender. This combined military, economic, political, and information attack should by now be familiar, because we have just watched it play out in Eastern Europe. Before 2014, Russia had hoped to conquer Ukraine without firing a shot, simply by convincing Ukrainians that their state was too corrupt and incompetent to survive. Now it is Beijing that seeks conquest without a full-scale military operation, in this case by convincing the Taiwanese that their democracy is fatally flawed, that their allies will desert them, that there is no such thing as a “Taiwanese” identity.

That’s what cognitive warfare is about. It’s convincing people Taiwan isn’t worth fighting for. There’s no telling how long before that is no longer just an academic question.