The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to

journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well.

How did the Chinese see these issues?

Last week, the US and Canada each sent a warship through the Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan has appealed to Washington to bring forward shipments of fighter aircraft to the islands.

It has been a 10th October for the Taiwan Strait.

At the beginning of the month, China celebrated its National Day, Guo Qingde.

And in the four days after that, 150 Chinese aircraft flew over

Taiwan's self-declared air defense identification zone, which, by the way, is not the same as

Taiwanese airspace. But nevertheless, that was a record number of incursions. But how much of this

is performative and how much of it actually betrays a Chinese desire to invade Taiwan in the short term?

And if China did want to invade Taiwan, what would it have to do in order to succeed?

That's the topic of this episode of Chinese Whispers and I'm joined by Oriana Skyler Mastro,

fellow at Stanford and the American Enterprise Institute.

Oriana wrote an incredibly detailed article looking into this exact topic for foreign affairs early in the year, which I will link to in the description.

So, Oriana, welcome to the podcast. First of all, in your article, you write about these four operations that China would have to complete in order to properly invade

Taiwan. Can you explain what they are? Right. So I think these are the four main military campaigns.

There's a lot of things that China does below the threshold of overt military force. We see these

every day, right? Economic coercion, psychological warfare, these

types of gray zone things. But the military itself has been preparing for relatively traditional

military activities to retake Taiwan by force. And there are four main ways that they can do this.

...