Recent military exercises and doctrine suggest the leading war plan for Beijing to compel Taiwan is a joint blockade. This plan envisions operations ranging from gray zone quarantines to more traditional protracted blockades that isolate Taipei and shift the balance of risk to U.S. and Japanese forces while setting conditions for follow-on military operations ranging from coercive firepower strikes to full-scale invasion.
A critical element of China’s strategy will be implemented in the cyber and space domains in peacetime. This demands sustained U.S. efforts to constrain China’s ability to harness commercial cyber and space resources before conflict begins. By targeting these networks—both physical and virtual—on which China depends for intelligence, communications, and operational reach, the United States and its allies can blunt Beijing’s coercive potential before a crisis erupts through implementing a deterrence-by-denial strategy.
Cyber and Space Capabilities in a Joint Blockade
A blockade is an age-old military concept for coordinating operations in military domains with diplomacy and economic statecraft to strangle an adversary. We use the term blockade in a broad sense, rather than the international legal definition. By isolating the enemy, including disrupting supply chains needed to generate combat power, a state can shape the strategic environment before and during protracted conflict. Key historical examples include, but are not limited to, the following:
The Union’s Anaconda Plan and its blockade of Confederate ports during the U.S. Civil War.
The global campaign to reduce German imports and sever the Kaiser’s overseas communications during World War I.
The Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, which at its core was an effort to impose a blockade on Nazi Germany that integrated naval patrols, aerial reconnaissance and interdiction, and signals intelligence.
The U.S. quarantine during the Cuban Missile Crisis and its role in supporting high-stakes negotiations.
Coalition military operations against Iraq from 1991 through the 2003 invasion that began with isolating Iraq from air and sea lines of communication.
The modern era has seen the expansion of blockades beyond the physical domains, with the United States enforcing economic embargoes and using cyber operations to pressure adversaries like Iran and North Korea. Today, great powers recognize that dominance in cyber and space operations is just as critical as traditional means of implementing a blockade (e.g., controlling sea lanes or airspace).
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) views a joint blockade as one of its core campaign designs, particularly in a Taiwan contingency, and uses military exercises like Joint Sword-2024 to hone its approach. The PLA’s approach would integrate precision missile strikes, electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and space-based targeting alongside diplomatic measures, including lawfare, to isolate Taiwan and deter U.S. intervention. The PLA Navy, Air Force, and Rocket Force would enforce exclusion zones with warships, submarines, air patrols, and long-range missile systems, while multiple state and private sector-linked entities would conduct offensive cyber operations to cripple Taiwan’s digital infrastructure, disrupt satellite communications, and disable financial networks. These activities would be complemented by the intensive use of electronic warfare and space-based capabilities to isolate Taiwan across multiple domains. Beijing can use a mix of gray zone measures and nonlethal effects in space and cyberspace as a lower rung on the escalation ladder short of escalating to more overt military displays and uses of force. China may calculate that it does not need to physically encircle Taiwan if it can sever its links to the world through networked coercion.
Disrupting a Blockade in Peacetime
The optimal counterpoint to a Chinese joint blockade is a deterrence-by-denial approach. We focus on the cyber and space elements of China’s blockade strategy. These domains are defined by distinct logics and suggest unique strategic imperatives: Capabilities are likely to be implemented not only in conflict but also in competition or the immediate outset of conflict; they disproportionately rely on private industry; and activity in and through both domains can take place at lower escalation levels.
Countering China in Cyberspace
The United States will need to find indirect ways of disrupting China’s ability to leverage private sector resources to support future offensive cyber campaigns supporting a joint blockade. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is an increasingly capable cyber actor, maturing its cyber campaigns from decades of espionage to increasingly blatant efforts to plant malware on critical infrastructure. Beijing is building capabilities and planning campaigns that involve offensive cyber operations to disrupt and degrade U.S. military mobilization in the event of a Taiwan contingency, coerce the United States into avoiding intervention, and disrupt Taiwan’s critical infrastructure and government services.
China is augmenting its government-based cyber capability, relying on a private network of hackers for hire. While these relationships have historically been more informal, China has recently asserted more direct control over cyber proxy actors, which are also increasingly mature. The government is a central hub for a sprawling network that connects private sector firms, academia, and technology service providers to design and execute offensive cyber campaigns on behalf of the CCP. The result is a hack-for-hire ecosystem optimized for cyber-enabled political warfare, including acts of sabotage that would support a joint blockade.
The United States can pursue multiple pathways to subvert China’s dependence on private actors. First, the United States must prioritize intelligence collection about China’s network of cyber proxies. This should include identifying key actors and nodes within the network; assessing relationships among proxy groups and with various government actors (i.e., the Ministry of State Security vs. the PLA); understanding specialization across actors; and identifying points of vulnerability. This can also include counter-cyber operations aimed at actively disrupting and degrading this network.
Second, the United States should exploit China’s dependence on global, interconnected Internet infrastructure to carry out its offensive cyber campaigns. Cyber activities rely on public and commercially owned infrastructure, including physical infrastructure (undersea cables, telecommunications infrastructure, internet exchange points, and data centers), and private sector entities such as cloud service providers. The United States should collaborate with global internet infrastructure owners, operators, and providers to detect and neutralize PLA-linked cyber activities before they can be deployed during a crisis.
Third, the United States should restrict China’s access to Western cloud and AI computing resources and advanced technologies in ways that benefit U.S. interests over the long term, while ensuring the United States retains robust private sector innovation. Many Chinese cyber operations rely on cloud-based AI training models, Western semiconductor technology, and advanced computing power. The United States should improve financial tracking mechanisms to limit China’s ability to leverage foreign technology in its cyber and space domains. It should also refine existing export controls, closing loopholes that have enabled China to circumvent current restrictions. That said, there are concerns that China will continue to find ways of circumventing existing restrictions. More importantly, while export controls may have immediate effects consistent with U.S. policy goals, over the long term they may be counterproductive, forcing China to innovate and develop its own supply chain over which the United States has little leverage or visibility. Ongoing efforts to restrict China’s access to critical technologies should be implemented in a deliberate, strategic manner, taking into account unintended consequences.
Finally, preemptively hardening allied and partner cyber infrastructure in anticipation of Chinese cyber campaigns is essential. The United States must ensure that allied networks and data infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific are resilient against Chinese cyber intrusions before a crisis unfolds. This includes increasing coordination with Japan, Australia, and Taiwan to create shared threat intelligence networks and implementing stricter cybersecurity standards for telecommunications infrastructure. As part of this effort, the Office of the National Cyber Director, as well as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, could implement exchange programs to support partner cyber defenses.
Countering China in the Space Domain
The United States will also need to find indirect ways of disrupting China’s use of commercial space resources to support a future joint blockade. China’s space sector increasingly relies on a mix of cooperative agreements with national space agencies, international organizations, and the private sector. Since 2014, China has evolved its space sector to increasingly rely on commercial firms. These firms are part of a larger state-led network connecting state-owned enterprises like the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation with the Academy of Sciences and even provincial governments. By 2022, over 400 commercial space companies were operating in China involved with activities ranging from launch to communication satellite constellations, remote sensing, and navigation.
The push to dominate the heavens also extends to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Through efforts like the BRI Space Information Corridor and Space Silk Road, which promotes Chinese access through tech transfers and cooperative projects in key regions like North Africa and the Middle East, China’s space network is increasingly global. Chinese commercial space companies now sell services around the world, including to U.S. partners like France and Saudi Arabia. China is positioned to be a leading space power with dual-use capabilities like reusable launch vehicles (e.g., Deep Blue Aerospace and Galactic Energy) and multiple satellite constellations, including very low earth orbit networks with low latency and intelligence algorithms managing sensing and transmission.
Many Western and allied private sector firms have invested in China’s space technology sector, either through direct partnerships, component supply chains, or financial markets. While Chinese firms are the main driver, this network includes leading U.S. venture capital firms like Sequoia and Matrix.
The United States can use regulatory measures, sanctions, and diplomatic engagement to compel companies to divest from high-risk Chinese space enterprises, particularly those with military-civil fusion ties. At the same time, it can use international forums ranging from the International Telecommunication Union to UN Outer Space Affairs and ensure key partners buying Chinese space services understand the risks. If nothing else, key partners like France, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt needed to be presented with the facts about civil-military fusion and scenarios about how a joint blockade would unfold using Chinese commercial space assets.
Stopping the Blockade Before It Begins
By treating China’s use of commercial cyber and space capabilities as a critical center of gravity, the United States and its allies can put in place a resilient deterrence posture well before a blockade scenario materializes. This requires a broad denial strategy that focuses on denying China the ability to harness private-sector support, protect its own assets, and exploit dual-use technologies. Effective implementation of these measures in peacetime not only raises the costs of aggression for Beijing but also advances a competitive strategy: It denies China strategic advantages, hinders its war plans, and reshapes the decision calculus. By tying deterrence by denial to a proactive, long-term competitive approach, the United States and its partners can better secure Taiwan’s defense—and, in doing so, help preserve the stability of the broader Indo-Pacific region.
Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Erica Lonergan is an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Kathleen McInnis is a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.