China's gray zone campaign against Taiwan was designed by soldiers who think about the ocean as if it were land, and it cannot achieve what Beijing wants, retired US Navy Admiral Dennis Blair said on October 14. Speaking by video at a maritime security conference hosted by Taiwan's Ocean Affairs Council, Blair said Taiwan has no reason to be intimidated by People's Liberation Army (PLA) drills, but must counter the pressure with more ingenuity so that Beijing never knows what Taipei will do next.
Blair, a retired four-star admiral, gave the keynote address at the 2026 International Conference on Sea Lane Security. The Ocean Affairs Council revived the biennial gathering in 2024 under its current name. This year's edition brought together experts from Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, with retired flag officers including former Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force chief Admiral Takei Tomohisa, retired Philippine Coast Guard Vice Admiral Robert Noble Patrimonio, and retired Royal Navy Vice Admiral Duncan Potts attending in person to discuss regional maritime security cooperation.
Blair Says Beijing Isolates Neighbors, Then Coerces Them
In a speech titled "Strategic Observations on China's Gray Zone Coercion Against Taiwan," Blair said Beijing's standard approach is to isolate its neighbors and pressure them one at a time. That makes it vital, he said, for those countries to work together and to bring in maritime powers from outside the region such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Against Taiwan, he said, gray zone pressure works on two levels. Diplomatically, Beijing keeps widening its claims to jurisdiction and influence over the waters and airspace around the island. Militarily, it sends warships and aircraft ever closer to Taiwan's coast and stages increasingly threatening exercises. The aim of all this activity at sea and in the air, Blair said, is to intimidate Taiwan's people and its leaders.
A Medieval Siege Strategy That Fails at Sea
Blair said China wants the world to believe that because it is bigger and stronger, absorbing Taiwan is inevitable, and it hopes that belief will push Taipei into political concessions and the surrender of sovereignty. But the strategy is hollow, he argued. It depends on Taiwan giving up without being invaded, much like a medieval European siege, in which an army surrounded a city and dug trenches toward its walls until the defenders concluded a breach was only a matter of time and surrendered.
That logic does not carry over to Taiwan, Blair said. At sea, the trenches can never reach the walls, and if China did attack, Taiwan would have strong backing from other countries. He said he chose a land warfare analogy on purpose, because China's current gray zone strategy was designed by its army, not its navy. "Army officers simply do not understand the maritime environment. They think about the ocean in terms of land warfare," he said.
Ships and Aircraft Cannot Hold the Sea Like Ground
If the Taiwan Strait and the waters around the island were land, Blair said, a Chinese military operation to seize them would indeed pose a grave threat to Taiwan's sovereignty. But they are ocean. In peacetime, ships and aircraft of any country may operate beyond Taiwan's 12-nautical-mile territorial sea. In wartime, the picture changes completely: with today's naval technology, surface ships and aircraft operating in narrow waters close to enemy territory are highly vulnerable to attack.
Asked why China would find it hard to truly encircle Taiwan from the sea, Blair said that in land warfare an army can occupy territory and dig in, but that is not possible at sea. He noted that China staged a maritime blockade exercise this year, yet once the drill ended it left nothing permanent behind and could not station a powerful force there for the long term. The same applies to air incursions, he said: a Chinese military aircraft may circle Taiwan for eight hours, but it still has to return to base.
Military and paramilitary operations on the high seas and in international airspace are temporary, Blair said, and do not change the fundamental wartime balance of forces. What decides the balance of naval, maritime, and air power is what happens once a war begins. As long as Taiwan keeps strong enough wartime capabilities, it can defeat any Chinese move and need not be bluffed by Beijing's peacetime operations. "If these operations were taking place on land 70 miles from Taiwan, and China could leave forces behind to create a persistent threat, that would be a different matter," he said.
Ships That Sail Closer Are Easier to Sink
Whether Taiwan can hold off China, Blair said, depends on whether it can deny China control of the sea and air in wartime. Seeing more PLA ships and aircraft operating closer to Taiwan than ever may be unsettling, he acknowledged, but professional naval officers see it differently: the closer those ships come in wartime, the easier they are for Taiwan to destroy. From a naval perspective, he added, it makes no difference whether China drills in the Bohai Sea or off Taiwan's coast. What matters is whether Taiwan and its allies can defeat a PLA task force in a war.
"If Taiwan is confident in its ability, with the support of its friends and allies, to defeat Chinese aggression in wartime, then China's gray zone claims and actions can produce only a superficial, media-amplified intimidation effect," Blair said. If Taiwan and partner governments understand the maritime environment clearly, he added, Beijing's actions will not even work politically.
That does not mean Taiwan and other maritime nations can ignore them, Blair cautioned. Taiwan must resist China's bullying at sea and stay alert to the risk that Beijing could use an exercise as cover for a real attack. Whenever China holds large-scale air and sea drills, Taiwan should still raise its readiness.
Blair Urges Taiwan to Keep Beijing Guessing
On tactics, Blair said Taiwan's response should start with close monitoring. It needs to maintain and continually upgrade its network of sensors and systems to locate, identify, and track Chinese navy ships, coast guard vessels, fishing boats, and merchant ships within 200 nautical miles, as well as every Chinese military and civilian aircraft in its air defense identification zone (ADIZ).
Taiwan must also take responsibility for enforcing international rules in certain areas, he said, but it has to choose its actions carefully. China has numerical superiority in naval, coast guard, and air forces, so Taiwan should not burn through its flight and sailing hours shadowing every Chinese ship or aircraft that enters its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) or ADIZ. Enforcement should be based on threat assessment and priorities, and should stay unpredictable so that Taiwan keeps the initiative.
"Taiwan's countermeasures need to be smarter and more creative, so that China never knows what Taiwan will do next and has reason to be cautious, and so that Taiwan's responses do not end up handing the advantage to China," Blair said. In the past, he noted, Taiwan has often answered each Chinese military aircraft by scrambling one of its own fighters to follow it. Instead, Taiwan's responses should be carefully planned: choosing to respond to only part of a Chinese operation, selecting forces that create favorable conditions, and establishing temporary local superiority in a limited area to enforce international law.
The Philippines Shows How to Win the Narrative
Beyond monitoring and enforcement, Blair said Taiwan needs active diplomacy and public messaging, and pointed to the Philippines as a strong model. He urged Taiwan's government, universities, and think tanks to analyze China's unlawful actions, publicize them consistently, and protest them. He cited the 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the case brought by Manila over Beijing's South China Sea claims as a highly effective step: China rejected the ruling, but its position was damaged.
Taiwan has tried to expose Chinese gray zone activity, Blair said, but could do it more effectively. Video from the scene posted on social media works better than government statements. Last year, footage of a PLA Navy vessel colliding with a China Coast Guard ship in the South China Sea badly embarrassed Beijing. If Taiwanese ships allowed foreign journalists aboard during carefully planned enforcement operations, he said, that too could show the world that China's claims and actions are both unlawful and clumsy.
To hold international attention, Blair said Taiwan's messaging must be creative and keep evolving, so that China cannot establish a new normal in global public perception. He stressed that all states are equal under international law. Whenever China introduces measures that violate it, Taiwan should respond with countermeasures that reject them, give Beijing no advantage, and keep making the case in its own policy and in public. If China escalates to a blockade, he added, Taiwan should state clearly that this is an act of war rather than a gray zone operation, and rally all maritime nations to oppose it.
A Blockade Would Move China Into the Black Zone
"Everything Taiwan does must rest on one fact: China is the aggressor, not Taiwan," Blair said, adding that Taiwan must make sure "the bad guy's hat" stays firmly on China's head and never ends up on Taiwan's. Most important, he said, Taiwan must strengthen and display its military and civilian capabilities so that the world knows it can repel Chinese air and sea aggression in wartime.
If China escalated to a real blockade, for example stopping ships bound for Taiwan and forcing them to change course, Blair said, it would no longer be gray zone harassment but would have entered a "black zone." At that point the United States and other seafaring nations could take measures, including military action. Helping Taiwan is squarely in the interest of every maritime nation, he said, because if Taiwan were bullied into giving up part of its sovereignty, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, and every other country in the region would have to ask whether it is next.
When Taiwan shoulders responsibility for its own defense and works with regional partners and outside powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, Blair said, Taiwan and the wider region will be far better equipped to handle gray zone operations. He also urged Taiwan to make more of its favorable geography and to develop military technologies China cannot easily counter, such as anti-ship missiles, unmanned systems, and advanced electronic warfare, raising the risks of an attack to a level that would deter Beijing.
