Analyzing PRC Narratives on Its Military Operations against Taiwan

• In Event: China and Taiwan in the News

Abstract

This paper explores Chinese military strategies for an invasion of Taiwan. The paper results from a two-year project that collects publicly available documents from the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) discussing military deployments in Taiwan and the use of force against Taiwan (between 2008 and 2024). In this paper we conduct quantitative content analysis on this batch of documents, with the aim of achieving the following two exploratory objectives: (1) Clarify how the PLA understands Taiwan's military policies and which specific Taiwanese military policies or equipment the PLA pays particular attention to. (2) Infer the preferred patterns of PLA's strategy for an invasion of Taiwan.
The paper employa quantitative data science techniques, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP), to collect PLA's non-classified documents regarding Taiwan and perform exploratory and systematic analysis on their content. This analysis will include named entity recognition (NER), part-of- speech tagging (POS tagging), word embeddings modeling, and the utilization of Transformers-based topic modeling, among other approaches. We anticipate that this paper will make an original contribution to the international China Studies academic and policy communities.
By studying how the PLA comprehends Taiwan's military policies and its discourse on attacking Taiwan, we can compare and verify the PLA's publicly available intelligence analyses with those of our own and our allied nations. The clarification of how the PLA understands Taiwan's military doctrines and identifying which Taiwanese military policies or equipment it pays special attention to are particularly important for the Taiwan government and society in the face of increasing military pressure from the Chinese Communist Party. Utilizing data science techniques to collect and analyze PLA documents related to Taiwan will enable us to provide not only logically consistent but also empirically grounded insights and inferences into the PLA's strategies for Taiwan and to identify trends and changes over different periods.

Author

• Titus C. Chen, National Sun Yat-sen University