In October 2025, Chinese police opened a criminal investigation into Puma Shen, a sitting Taiwanese legislator, on charges of “separatism”—the first application of Beijing’s 2024 judicial guidelines targeting “Taiwan independence diehards.” Within weeks, People’s Republic of China (PRC) state media broadcast calls for his arrest via Interpol. Chinese social media accounts circulated satellite imagery marking his home and office in Taipei. Two months later, the PLA conducted its largest blockade exercise around Taiwan in years, with state media listing “leadership decapitation” among the drill’s stated objectives.
A year earlier, these developments would have seemed like escalatory fantasies. But they follow a pattern. In 2024, a PRC court sentenced a Taiwanese activist to nine years in prison on a charge of “separatism.” It was the first time Beijing had jailed a Taiwanese citizen under this charge. Later, a Taiwanese publisher received three years for “inciting secession” for books he published in Taiwan. The legal infrastructure Beijing has been assembling for two decades is being activated, in sequence, against progressively higher-profile targets. If the U.S. policy community wants to understand where a Taiwan crisis is most likely to begin, it should spend less time studying amphibious ship counts and more time reading PRC statutes.
The “lawfare” campaign—Beijing’s use of legal instruments as tools of coercion—is the leading edge of China’s pressure campaign against Taiwan. It will almost certainly intensify before any military escalation. Indeed, Beijing may use legal fig leaves like “customs enforcement” to try to seize control of Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing base intact, without firing a shot. The United States and its allies have done virtually no coordinated planning for how to respond.
The PRC’s Lawfare Toolkit
China’s lawfare against Taiwan rests on two statutory pillars. First, the 2005 Anti-Secession Law specifies three deliberately vague conditions under which Beijing may resort to “non-peaceful” methods against Taiwan: (a) “If ‘Taiwan independence’ forces, under whatever name and method, achieve de facto Taiwanese separation from China”; (b) “If a ‘major incident’ occurs that would lead to Taiwan becoming separated from China”; and (c) “If all possibility of peaceful unification disappears.” The law leaves terms such as “de facto separation” and “major incident” undefined to preserve the flexibility to redefine red lines at any time. Second, the 2015 National Security Law broadens this umbrella, asserting PRC jurisdiction over any activities at all that Beijing deems threatening to its “core interests.” Together, according to the PRC, these laws assert supremacy over Taiwanese law and create the legal basis for Beijing to claim that anyone who acts in ways Beijing considers supportive of “Taiwan independence” is committing a crime under PRC law. The charge of “separatism” could theoretically be applied to any member of Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party, whose platform Beijing labels as separatist.
The coercion extends to claiming jurisdiction over Taiwan nationals anywhere in the world. Beijing has begun pressuring Taiwanese citizens visiting or working on the mainland to acquire PRC local identity cards—a direct challenge to Taiwanese sovereignty. Hundreds of Taiwanese citizens have been deported from third countries to China to face trial. Over 60 countries have extradition treaties with China that cover political offenses, and Taiwan’s government has warned its citizens about the risks of traveling to any of them. In June 2024, the PRC published formal guidelines for prosecuting “Taiwan independence diehards” under the separatism statutes, codifying the procedural framework for broader enforcement.
This domestic and extraterritorial legal campaign is reinforced by an offensive in international institutions. Central to this effort is Beijing’s campaign to redefine UN General Assembly Resolution 2758. The 1971 text recognized the PRC as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations,” transferring the Chinese seat from Taipei to Beijing. Notably, the resolution’s language refrains from taking a position on Taiwan’s sovereign status. Beijing, in turn, has launched a major propaganda effort asserting, baselessly, that the UN has accepted the “One China Principle” and that Taiwan is therefore legally a part of the PRC under international law. As part of this campaign, sustained diplomatic pressure has led to Taiwan’s exclusion from the International Civil Aviation Organization, the World Health Assembly, and other international bodies.
These bodies don’t just coordinate flight routes and pandemic response—membership in them is one of the basic markers of standing in the international system. Each exclusion narrows the space in which Taiwan is recognized as a distinct actor, making it incrementally easier for Beijing to assert that the international community has already accepted its claims. If this revisionist reading prevails, Taiwan will have few remaining pathways to contest China’s actions through international institutions—and fewer governments willing to defend its right to do so.
The Escalation Pathway
It is precisely this erosion of Taiwan’s international standing that would lay the groundwork for more direct forms of coercion. The PRC’s lawfare campaign is not merely a complement to military pressure; it is the mechanism by which a quarantine or blockade could be legally justified—and, crucially, the mechanism by which Beijing could make a coercive move against Taiwan look, to much of the world, like a routine law enforcement action.
Consider the quarantine scenario that Robert Blackwill and Philip Zelikow first described in a 2021 Council on Foreign Relations report: Beijing’s customs authority announces that all goods and people entering and exiting Taiwan must first clear customs on the mainland. Existing PRC law already establishes a plausible basis for this claim. The rules could apply to all traffic, or only to specific categories—people convicted of a crime under PRC law, or shipments suspected of carrying “contraband” such as weapons. The latter allows Beijing to present itself to the world as exercising routine enforcement while simultaneously selectively strangling Taiwan’s ability to arm itself. Punishing only a few noncompliant Taiwanese operators would ensure widespread compliance, since private carriers have no interest in losing their ships or insurance coverage. Over time, Beijing could gradually escalate into this scenario without ever formally announcing new rules, outsourcing enforcement to Taiwanese and foreign operators themselves.
The more plausibly deniable Beijing’s pretext, the harder it would be for the United States to mobilize a coalition response. Beijing could claim it is cracking down on, for example, fentanyl precursors, or enforcing customs law that it insists has always applied to “Taiwan province.” Each pretext is absurd on its merits—but each is supported by statutes that Beijing has carefully put in place.
China has many options to escalate the lawfare campaign to just short of a full quarantine on Taiwan. It could demand that Taiwanese companies with business on the mainland share employee and customer data. It could curtail direct flights between Taiwan and third countries by pressuring airlines to route through the mainland. It could target Taiwanese officials by name through Interpol’s red notice system. This legal infrastructure is already in place, and can be activated in stages, each more coercive than the last, each plausibly deniable. The lawfare campaign is the connective tissue that links peacetime pressure to gray-zone crisis to outright conflict.
Why the Law Matters
There is a temptation in certain corners of Washington to dismiss the legal dimension of this problem. The Trump administration has a track record of little reverence for international institutions. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Appellate Body is paralyzed. Why should Americans care what Beijing does at the UN or in its domestic courts?
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https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/china-s-legal-warfare-against-taiwan
