Free Lectures" Let the enemy be lenient. What kind of future war is the CCP preparing to fight?

The Chinese Communist Party has recently revised the National Defense Mobilization Law. What really deserves Taiwan's attention is not the superficial number of "whether men aged 18 to 60 may be mobilized." It is that Beijing is redesigning the entire country into a huge machine that can quickly switch to wartime mode. The new version of the law formally incorporates "development interests" into the legal framework of national defense mobilization, and further emphasizes the transformation of economic and social forces into national defense strength. Everything from transportation, energy, telecommunications, Internet, finance, and food to civilian vehicles, equipment, buildings, and professional and technical personnel may become part of the wartime system. This means that what the CCP wants to prepare is never a traditional war in which the People's Liberation Army is solely responsible, but a modern general war in which the country's overall strength is fully invested.

The biggest feature of future wars is that the boundaries between the front line and the rear are becoming increasingly blurred. Missile strikes, drone swarms, satellite reconnaissance, cyberattacks, electromagnetic suppression, financial sanctions, disinformation and cognitive operations may all begin before the first shell is dropped. If the CCP wants to take military action against Taiwan, it will not necessarily start with a large-scale landing. It is more likely to first paralyze communications, finance, energy, ports and command systems, and then gradually reduce Taiwan's living space through sea and air blockades, cyber attacks and gray zone operations. In other words, what Beijing is preparing is not simply to "take down an island", but how to weaken a society's will to resist and the country's ability to operate before the actual war begins.

This also explains why China continues to emphasize military-civilian integration, transition from peacetime to wartime, and national strategic system. For the CCP, private technology companies may be suppliers of drones and artificial intelligence during wartime, logistics companies may become military transportation networks, communications companies may become information warfare infrastructure, and large engineering machinery may be directly used for military support. The real question is therefore not how many warships China has, but whether China can transform its huge industry, technology, transportation and population into war capabilities in a short period of time. This is the core of total war thinking, and it is also the point where Taiwan cannot be understood solely with the traditional concept of "army versus army."

However, the CCP's establishment of such a highly centralized war mobilization system also exposed its real weaknesses. Totalitarian states can use laws to force people, businesses, and resources to obey the demands of war, but they cannot guarantee that the entire society is truly willing to bear the costs of war. When the economy is shut down, finances are hit, industrial chains are disrupted, young people are drafted, and cities are under attack, no matter how rigorous the propaganda machine is, it must face real costs. What Taiwan really needs to learn is not to copy the CCP-style forced mobilization, but to build the social resilience of a democratic country, including decentralized communications, energy backup, critical infrastructure protection, civil defense training, unmanned systems, large reserve mobilization and information reading capabilities, so that its opponents know that even if they launch a first strike, Taiwan cannot quickly lose its ability to resist.

So the question is no longer "will the CCP prepare for war?" but that it is preparing for a future total war spanning military, technology, economy, Internet, energy and social psychology. What Taiwan really needs to build is a resilient Taiwan that "cannot be defeated, blocked, deceived, or delayed."