Guermantes Lailari On Taiwan: Taiwan’s Sweet Potato Roots of Defiance: Shattering China’s Post-Invasion Blueprint

If Taiwan falls, the true battle moves from the beaches into the concrete streets.

Western analysts fixate on the invasion phase. They end wargames when missiles stop flying and submit policy papers after the fate of a beachhead is decided. This narrow focus ignores the grim reality of “the day after.”

To address this blind spot, the Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) published a seminal study on March 5, 2026, titled China’s Way of Occupation: Implications for Taiwan. Authored by Jan K. Gleiman and others, the report analyzes Beijing’s actions in Tibet, Xinjiang (East Turkestan), and Hong Kong to expose a chilling playbook executed through seven lines of action:

Peacetime Shaping: Beijing sets psychological conditions for surrender before invading by mapping littoral approaches, modifying commercial ferries for armor deployment, and weaponizing “Cognitive Defeatism” (wangguo lun, 亡國論) to brand resistance as futile.

Legal Formalism: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) weaponizes local laws using security decrees to reclassify civic defiance as criminal subversion.

Identity Erasure: The PRC imposes state narratives to systematically erase and rewrite local heritage, mirroring its cultural erasure campaigns in Tibet and Xinjiang (East Turkestan).

Structural Surveillance: The PRC embeds surveillance via tracking matrices, facial surveillance, and biometric databases.

Manipulating Freedom: The PRC manipulates economic freedoms to keep populations unsteady.

Institutional Co-optation: The PRC hijacks bureaucracies to force local civil services to execute occupation directives.

Generational Patience: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) treats time as a strategic asset, absorbing decades of international sanctions to normalize its territorial control permanently.

To counter this psychological framing, Taiwan’s mindset must shift toward po f? chen zh?u (破釜沉舟) — breaking cooking pots and sinking boats — signaling an unyielding determination to resist.

THE PARAMILITARY ENFORCEMENT MACHINE

The PRC does not rely on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for post-invasion governance. Post-combat, the architecture pivots to specialized constabulary forces led by the People’s Armed Police (PAP). Trained in counter-riot operations and urban suppression, the PAP isolates communities, executes political purges, and enforces population control.

THE BLIND SPOTS IN THE RESISTANCE EQUATION

The IWC report distinguishes two broad seizure scenarios with different post-seizure dynamics:

Scenario A: Capitulation Under Coercion. Physical infrastructure remains intact under maritime blockades, but digital and civic campaigns of disobedience ensue.

Scenario B: Compellence Through Invasion. Kinetic military conquest shatters the country and triggers a prolonged, armed guerrilla campaign. This scenario forces planners to decouple total kinetic war from ongoing gray-zone escalation.

In classical Chinese military thought, Sun Tzu emphasizes shi (勢) — the strategic configuration of power and momentum. Beijing attempts to manipulate this shi through a psychological inversion of the “Empty Fort Strategy” (k?ngcheng ji, 空城計), weaponizing gray-zone maneuvers and Cognitive Defeatism to project an illusion of absolute mastery, tricking Taiwan into psychological surrender. Countering this requires injecting three alternative, high-probability scenarios into the equation to disrupt China’s calculated configuration.

Scenario C: The Decapitation and “Puppet State” Infiltration. The IWC report assumes institutional co-optation occurs after infrastructure collapse. However, the PRC “playbook” involves leveraging fifth columnists to compromise defenses alongside cyberwarfare and electronic warfare attacks. These actions paralyze communications to allow PRC special forces to eliminate Taiwan’s command structure.

Beijing then installs a pre-vetted puppet administration, which issues an “invitation” to the PAP and PLA to restore public order during a “domestic crisis.” This maneuver exploits political polarization and discredits ROC legitimacy. This collaborationist setup, mirroring the historical WWII Vichy France model, avoids the trauma of an amphibious invasion, deflates global sympathy, and complicates foreign intervention. Resistance networks would face a civil-bureaucratic entity in which local officials and police — coerced by the puppet government — execute Beijing’s directives under local legal authority.

Scenario D: The “Salami-Slicing” and Partial Seizure Limbo. International law binds Penghu (the Pescadores) to Taiwan under the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, and the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) — meaning a strike there could trigger a direct military response from Taipei and Washington. To bypass these treaty tripwires, Beijing is highly likely to target outposts outside this diplomatic framework by annexing Kinmen or Matsu or capturing Dongsha (東沙群島) or Itu Aba (太平島) in the South China Sea. Since the critical February 2024 Kinmen speedboat incident, the China Coast Guard has already been utilizing “Legal Formalism” via regular incursions. Severing these remote outposts allows the PRC to evaluate occupation and surveillance matrices on captive territory while trapping Formosa in a suffocating economic limbo designed to drive capital flight and demoralize the population.

Scenario E: The “Failed State” Chaos and Fractional Survival. The IWC report overlooks how a stalled invasion could deteriorate into ‘Failed State’ chaos or a scorched-earth stalemate. If the PLA shatters central infrastructure but fails to secure Taiwan’s rugged terrain, the island fractures into autonomous resistance zones cut off from essential resources. Neighborhood civil defense forces must fight occupying patrols and fend off starvation to show Beijing it will inherit a multi-generational resource drain rather than a submissive province. This decentralized survival tactically validates the uniquely Taiwanese proverb: “sweet potatoes are not afraid of rotting in the soil; they only ask that their branches and leaves be passed down from generation to generation.” Mirroring the island’s shape and the plant’s hardy biology, an unyielding local identity ensures decentralized survival even under total devastation.

THE INSULAR BOTTLENECK

Geography affects Taiwan’s deeply entrenched civic identity. Unlike Ukraine, which has overland supply routes, a maritime blockade could sever the continuous flow of weapons, food, energy, and medical supplies into Taiwan. There are no porous land borders to supply an ongoing insurgency. This fundamental isolation is compounded by an acute physical bottleneck: Taiwan’s dependence on a limited network of undersea fiber-optic cables risks an instantaneous, total communications blackout.

Taiwan’s vulnerability to blockade means that a resistance movement might not be organized effectively once a kinetic conflict begins. The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) emphasizes that a viable resistance architecture cannot be an ad-hoc civilian undertaking during an invasion; it must be legally established, structured, and driven by the sovereign central government during peacetime. This pre-emptive, state-directed strategy embodies the timeless strategic principle of j? ?n s? w?i (居安思危) — prepare for danger in times of peace. This hard lesson was forged under Nazi occupation during World War II and decades of Soviet Communist occupation of Eastern Europe. The architecture, clandestine command loops, and resource networks should be legally and structurally hardcoded into the civil fabric by the state before a crisis erupts. Domestic self-sufficiency is a baseline survival necessity.

THE PEACETIME MANDATE

The IWC report delivers an urgent mandate for Taipei and Washington. Grounding these alternative scenarios in international relations theory uncovers a profound application of Deterrence by Denial. While traditional deterrence emphasizes punishment, structuralizing whole-of-society resistance shifts the cost-benefit matrix before a missile flies, denying Beijing confidence by turning conquest into a multi-generational asymmetric trap.

Crucially, this architecture relies on a multi-layered application of Assurance Theory. Externally, Washington must assure Taipei of its conventional commitment so that post-invasion planning is never misread as beachhead abandonment. Internally, institutionalizing a resistance operating concept assures Taiwan’s population by providing the structured agency to survive extreme conditions and maintain democratic sovereignty. Simultaneously, this domestic readiness delivers reciprocal assurance to Washington, signaling a firm “will to fight” that minimizes the domestic political risk for US intervention.

This framework addresses a severe regulatory blind spot within Taiwan’s All-out Defense Mobilization Agency (ADMA): the core statute, the All-out Defense Mobilization Readiness Act (全民防衛動員準備法), permits only full mobilization, completely lacking statutory mechanics for partial mobilization during a creeping gray-zone crisis. This statutory gap leaves the nation vulnerable to pre-war paralysis.

Therefore, President William Lai’s (賴清德) “Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience” focus must explicitly expand into a comprehensive “Whole-of-Society Resistance” architecture, channeling the historic ethos of sweet potato resilience through horizontal defense networks. While resilience merely absorbs a crisis to bounce back, resistance actively denies the adversary its political objectives. This requires adopting lessons from the Baltic “Forest Brothers” — the underground partisan movements in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that fought Soviet communist annexation for a decade. While they ultimately struggled without secure maritime lifelines or peacetime state structures, the Lai administration can avoid this fate by hardcoding clandestine mechanisms now, under a functioning democracy.

In alignment with the Resistance Operating Concept doctrine, this entire architecture must be mandated during peacetime but designed for decentralized execution to survive a decapitation strike. The state must legally vest local municipal districts and civil defense units with autonomous communication loops, staged supplies, and explicit continuity-of-governance protocols to instantly bypass a treasonous puppet administration. Given Taiwan’s acute vulnerability to maritime blockades — particularly its limited, days-long reserve of liquefied natural gas — food and medical stockpiles, water-purification capacity, and off-grid emergency energy must be structurally embedded into every local township and apartment block.

True deterrence lies in forcing CCP planners to realize that subduing Taiwan means confronting an island where every city block and mountain village is engineered by the state to function as a bastion of defiance. Taiwan’s ultimate contribution to deterrence is the unyielding psychological infrastructure of a populace that flatly refuses to be ruled by the CCP, turning any occupation into a multi-generational trap the CCP cannot survive.

Guermantes Lailari is a retired US Air Force Foreign Area Officer specializing in counterterrorism, irregular warfare, missile defense, and strategy. He holds advanced degrees in international relations and strategic intelligence. He was a Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan Fellow in 2022, a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University and National Defense University in 2023, and a visiting researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in 2024 and 2025. He is currently researching in Taiwan as a senior non-resident fellow from the Jewish Policy Center in Washington, DC.