A Restricted PLA Article Maps How to Capture Taipei by Breaking Its Will to Fight

A March 2025 article in Military Art, a restricted Chinese military journal overseen by the Central Military Commission, lays out a framework for taking Taipei that its authors describe as a concept, not yet doctrine and not a campaign plan. The framework, named in Chinese 大型城市全域失能战 or "all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare," treats psychological collapse as a peer to firepower, a victory condition most public English-language discussion of a Taiwan war has not yet priced in.

The piece appeared in a journal with restricted military circulation, which is why it can speak in operational specifics that would not survive an open Chinese press review. [Military Art (《军事艺术》)](https://warontherocks.com/total-war-on-taipei-china-explores-elevating-cognitive-effects-into-its-vision-of-warfare/) is described in a War on the Rocks analysis and surfaced through a RAND external publication record as China's leading internal journal on military theory, overseen and approved by the Central Military Commission. That placement lets the authors walk a reader through a planning logic, not a slogan, and a Small Wars Journal post on the same piece notes the journal is read by officers and strategists inside the PLA system.

The framework's target is not Taipei the city in the sense of its buildings or its garrison. The target is Taipei as a population and a decision-making system. The article's five stated objectives, in the order it lists them, are: block external assistance to the city, restrict the city's ability to enable operations, break the operational system, collapse cognitive cohesion, and eliminate the ability to recover. The first three belong to the kinetic vocabulary most Western wargames already model. The fourth, "collapsing cognitive cohesion," is the one that earns the article its name and is treated in the text on the same planning axis as the others. The fifth, eliminating recovery, is what makes the framework an incapacitation concept rather than a destruction one: the city need not be flattened if its capacity to reconstitute itself is broken.

Two newer PLA strategic ideas give the framework its language. "National total war" (国家总体战) is whole-of-nation mobilization, treating the economy, the information space, and the population as instruments of war in the same register as the military. "Cognitive domain operations" (认知域作战) is the PLA's term for shaping the mental space where people and organizations make decisions, broader than propaganda and broader than cyber influence. The Military Art authors combine the two into a megacity-scale operational concept: incapacitate the city's ability to function and to choose to keep fighting in one move, rather than attriting its forces until they surrender.

The article is presented explicitly as exploratory. It is research contributing to an internal debate, not an approved war plan, and the War on the Rocks reading is careful to repeat that caveat. But that is also the part most worth sitting with. A concept that puts cognitive collapse on a peer axis with firepower inside a megacity context is a different victory condition from the one most public discussion of a Taiwan scenario assumes, which usually centers on ship-and-missile counts, blockade economics, or polling on the island's will to fight. The framework, even as a concept, gives Chinese military researchers a way to plan for an outcome that is not the same as winning the kinetic fight, and to plan for it without waiting for that fight to be decided first.

The article's most useful export is a new line to think along: if a future operation is judged by whether it broke the population's will to keep resisting, then the indicators to watch, the targets to harden, and the kind of partner support that matters all shift, too, even for readers who never see the journal itself.