Watching Beijing Watching Moscow: Takeaways for a Taiwan Conflict
This week, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth year. What began as a European war has transformed into a live-fire laboratory for how major-power conflict unfolds across domains. The war’s protraction is instructive. The persistence of kinetic operations and operational pressures are demonstrating that contemporary interstate conflict can endure alongside tactical and institutional adaptation—and that such adaptation can enable its endurance.
Beijing has been closely studying Russia’s evolving approach to the conflict, conducted under sanction, surveillance, and constant drone threat. Across the People’s Republic of China (PRC), researchers and analysts are extracting lessons on how to fight, endure, and prevail in a conflict against a U.S.-led coalition characterized by deep intelligence, technological, and financial leverage.
For analysts and researchers linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Russia’s war illuminates the contours of a Taiwan Strait contingency or a parallel crisis in the South China Sea. Military operations targeting Taiwan are likely to be joint, high-intensity, and information-transparent. They will be fought under conditions of coalition-enabled asymmetric transparency, in which one side is persistently observable and targetable.
Chinese military analysts recognize Ukraine’s advantages. These lie in a system composed of resilient communications, ubiquitous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), rapid targeting cycles, and battlefield networking enabled by commercial and allied space assets. Analysts view Russia’s failure to neutralize this connectivity as a cautionary lesson for the PLA.
Space power is emerging in PRC expert discourse as foundational to combat power rather than merely a niche enabler of it. Analyses across PLA institutions emphasize the need for resilient low Earth orbit and communications satellites, as well as hardened positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and integrated space, cyber, electromagnetic countermeasures. Rather than relying primarily on destructive counterspace operations, PRC experts increasingly advocate soft-kill methods that disrupt networks, terminals, and data flows. Beijing’s push to expand satellite constellations and elevate commercial space reflects a judgment that survivability in high-intensity conflict depends on scale and rapid reconstitution.
Russia’s invasion also demonstrates that maritime inferiority can be offset by unmanned, attritable systems operating in coordinated swarms. Chinese naval analysts frame Ukraine’s unmanned surface vehicle (USV) operations in the Black Sea as a model for imposing disproportionate costs on capital ships and port infrastructure. Experts warn that the PRC’s coastline and outposts in the South China Sea could face similar raids by unmanned systems. This has prompted calls for layered early warning, barriers, electronic and kinetic defenses, and, eventually, directed-energy systems. These prescriptions are indicative of PLA expectations of an adversary strategy to contest littoral and exposed island positions.
Unmanned systems are also in action on land and in the air, where Ukraine has embraced an autonomous battlefield. Here, drone swarms, first-person-view strike systems, anti-jam innovations, and AI-enabled decision support compress the kill chain. PLA observers are incorporating these lessons into Taiwan-relevant operational concepts, with simulations showing heavy reliance on drones across phases of a potential amphibious campaign. Chinese analysts simultaneously stress the need for counter-swarm defenses, underscoring a belief that system integration, rather than individual platforms, will determine the outcome of any future conflict.
Beyond the traditional battlefield, Beijing views Ukraine as proof that war is waged through finance as well as firepower. PRC researchers treat sanctions on Russia, including reserve freezes, SWIFT exclusion, and export controls, as tools likely to be applied against the PRC in the event of a Taiwan crisis. Proposed countermeasures include reserve diversification, capital controls, anti-sanctions legal frameworks, and expanded use of alternative settlement systems. The implication is clear: in the pursuit of its political objectives, Beijing is preparing to fight in a transparent battlespace and weather prolonged coalition coercion.
Methodology. This memo synthesizes four analyses published in The Jamestown Foundation’s publication China Brief between March 2025 and January 2026. Each of these articles translate and interpret a diverse corpus of Chinese sources, including academic papers from researchers at military institutions, technical writings by experts in the defense industry and state-owned enterprises, commentaries in state media outlets, and analyses by financial policy elites. These are synthesized to paint a coherent picture of lessons that Beijing has learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the institutional responses those lessons are catalyzing.
The sources surveyed are important indicators of planning priorities and doctrinal debates. But they should not be viewed as deterministic predictors of PRC or PLA behavior. The goal of this analysis is to better understand Beijing’s strategic intent, its priorities, and its concerns. The hope is that this research can help policymakers to anticipate plausible actions in the South China Sea and across the Taiwan Strait before a crisis collapses the window for deliberation on how best to respond.
The Jamestown Foundation would like to thank the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting this work.
To read the full report, click here.
