How China’s civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion

Eleven days later, on September 3, China’s President Xi Jinping rode in an open-topped limousine past a massive People’s Liberation Army parade in Beijing, celebrating China’s victory over Japan 80 years earlier.

“Comrades, you’ve been working hard,” his amplified voice boomed as he swept along the ranks.

Xi did not mention Taiwan in a speech after the parade, but gaining control over the island is a paramount goal for the Chinese leader and his ruling Communist Party. China views democratically governed Taiwan as part of its territory and has never renounced the use of force to take control of the island. Taiwan’s government rejects China’s claims, saying only the island’s people can decide their future.

​​China’s quest to take over Taiwan is at the center of intensifying rivalry between Beijing and Washington for dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. Earlier this month, China issued the latest reminder of its growing naval muscle with the commissioning of its third aircraft carrier, the 80,000-tonne Fujian, a bigger and much more advanced warship than the two carriers already in service, according to naval experts. From tiny atolls deep in the Pacific Ocean, to the strategic archipelagos of Japan and the Philippines, China and the U.S. are engaged in preparations for a potentially fateful showdown.

“The Taiwan question is purely an internal affair of China, and how to resolve it is entirely a matter for the Chinese people,” the foreign ministry in Beijing said in response to questions. China is willing “to pursue the prospect of peaceful reunification, but we will never allow anyone or any force to separate Taiwan from China by any means whatsoever,” the ministry said. China’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions, Taiwan’s defense ministry referred Reuters to comments made in September by Defense Minister Wellington Koo, who said that the island maintains “continuous oversight” of China’s use of roll-on, roll-off vessels. “We closely monitor how they support military operations,” Koo said, adding that Taiwan has “developed relevant contingency plans.”

The arsenal of weapons on display during Xi’s parade included amphibious assault vehicles that would be crucial for seizing control of Taiwan. Reuters also observed civilian ships loading similar amphibious assault vehicles in this year’s naval exercises.

With a fleet of these civilian ships drafted to serve alongside the world’s biggest navy, China can exploit the full scope of its massive maritime power in preparing for an attack on Taiwan. The PLA has legal authority to take control of civilian shipping for military purposes.

The way China used civilian cargo vessels in this summers’ exercises is “a substantial moving of the needle” towards being able to carry enough troops, equipment and supplies to the beaches of Taiwan as part of an invasion, said Thomas Shugart, a former U.S. submarine officer who closely follows China’s fleet.

“This is a very significant development,” said Shugart, referring to China using deck cargo ships to offload vehicles directly onto the beach, which he recently wrote about on X. “It is a huge increase in their first wave capacity, in their ability to take heavy vehicles straight to the beach in a first wave.”

China’s civilian ships are the product of its vast commercial shipbuilding industry, which serves customers all over the world. In less than three decades, China’s shipyards have built the world’s biggest navy and now account for about 53% of global shipbuilding. By comparison, the U.S. accounts for 0.1%.

This massive commercial fleet would be crucial in a full-scale Taiwan invasion, an operation that could surpass the Second World War’s Normandy landings in scale and complexity.

To be sure, China’s advances in training, tactics and equipment wouldn’t necessarily guarantee success. Taking the island would be a formidable challenge for a landing force embarking from the Chinese coast. Waters in the Taiwan Strait are often treacherous with storms, rough seas, powerful tides and fog. Towering mountains line most of Taiwan’s east coast, and the few more suitable landing sites on the densely populated north and west coast closest to China have been identified for decades, allowing the island’s military to prepare to defend them.

China would have to solve many tactical challenges before it could successfully invade Taiwan, said J. Michael Dahm, a former U.S. naval intelligence officer and senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“Just because a force can demonstrate a capability to do something once in the course of a day, doesn’t mean they can do it day after day after day after day,” he said.

The Chinese military only has enough ships and landing craft to carry about 20,000 troops and their equipment across the strait in the first wave of a landing, according to Taiwanese and American military experts. These experts calculate that the PLA would need to deploy 300,000 to 1 million or more troops to subdue the island’s defenders. These forces would need to be supported with shipments of supplies and ammunition – hence the need for an armada of civilian vessels.

The ships deployed in the drills Reuters monitored this summer would amount to a small fraction of the fleet required.

New beach landing strategy

Still, China’s naval capabilities keep growing, the Reuters analysis shows. Throughout the summer, we tracked the movements of more than 100 civilian vessels that have participated in drills like the August one or are owned by operators that often participate in military exercises.

In July, we identified an exercise underway at the beach near Jiesheng, and spotted several deck cargo ships cruising toward the beach, loaded with vehicles.

A swarm of these civilian vessels could sharply boost the size of the forces deployed for an invasion and potentially enable China to carry out assaults at a bigger number of sites on Taiwan, according to Taiwanese and U.S. experts on amphibious warfare.

Admiral Lee Hsi-min, a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces and one of the island’s leading thinkers on defense and security, said the satellite images of the August exercises revealed the PLA was now experimenting with craft smaller than the bigger civilian vessels used in earlier drills.

“My guess is that they are trying to develop a kind of large number of small amphibious landing ships supported by the civilian sector,” Lee said. “During wartime, they would conduct multi-point, small amphibious landing operations.”

This could be more difficult for Taiwan’s defenders to repulse than landings at fewer sites, he added.

Reuters’ findings show China has reached a point where it is developing concrete invasion plans, said Yuster Yu, a retired Taiwanese naval officer who served on Taiwan’s National Security Council. “This kind of thing worries me more than their aircraft carriers,” he said. “It shows they are serious about putting troops on the ground.”

The roll-on, roll-off ferries have participated in Chinese military exercises since at least 2019, according to a U.S. military report. Images from state media show that some of them can drop off or pick up amphibious assault vehicles directly from the water, using retrofitted ramps.

Deck cargo ships have moved military equipment during some earlier exercises, said Dahm, who has written extensively about China’s shadow navy. But this summer is the first time these vessels have been seen unloading vehicles directly onto a beach, according to seven naval warfare experts Reuters interviewed.

“The PLA continues to demonstrate new capabilities that are putting them on a path to having the amount of capability and capacity that they need to conduct a full-scale invasion,” Dahm said.

These ships are numerous and play an important role in Chinese commercial coastal shipping. But ship registration databases are not detailed enough to distinguish them from other cargo vessels, so a precise tally is not possible.

“The simple design and relative ease of construction of deck cargo ships means they can quickly be built in large numbers,” researcher Conor Kennedy wrote in a 2024 report about these vessels published by the U.S. Naval War College.

Several of the cargo ships we tracked were docked before the August exercise in the Chinese city of Taizhou. There, satellite images show dozens of similar vessels moored near shipyards. They are sold for less than $3 million, according to the yards’ social media posts.

The roll-on, roll-off ferries cost more, but far less than a large military amphibious assault ship. In 2020, one Bohai ferry operator said its newest ship cost 410 million yuan, about $60 million. The latest America-class amphibious assault ship under construction for the U.S. Navy, roughly equivalent to China’s Type 076 version which has just completed sea trials, is estimated to cost more than $3.8 billion, according to Pentagon budget estimates.

Ferry companies identified by Reuters as having vessels involved in the August exercise didn’t respond to requests for comment. Reuters was unable to contact the cargo ship companies.

The cargo ships from the summer exercises appear to be transporting military trucks or utility vehicles that would carry troops and general supplies like arms and food, said Sean O’Connor, an analyst with Janes, the defense intelligence firm. Not all vehicles in the imagery are clear enough to identify.

Cargo ships could land after the first amphibious assault vehicles swim to shore, and play a crucial role in resupplying them before China gains control of Taiwanese infrastructure, Dahm said.

“Once that armor gets ashore, it only has maybe two days before it starts running out of stuff,” he said. “It’s going to run out of bullets. It’s going to run out of gas.”

Satellite images of the August exercise taken by BlackSky and Planet Labs show vehicles building up on shore during the exercise.

By 2:59 p.m. on August 23, about six hours after signals from three of the cargo ships revealed they were at the beach near Jiesheng, Reuters counted at least 330 vehicles on or near the shore. Some were clustered at the landing sites we identified along that beach, suggesting they arrived aboard the shadow navy ships. Reuters couldn’t determine if all the vehicles on the beach were offloaded during the exercise.

Military experts suggest one objective of these high-profile amphibious exercises could be to intimidate Taiwan in the hope that it would accept Beijing’s rule rather than suffer a bloody invasion. Xi and other Chinese leaders routinely insist they favor a peaceful takeover. However, this outcome seems increasingly unlikely, especially after China mounted an ongoing crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong. Opinion polls suggest that the overwhelming majority of Taiwan’s 23 million people do not support a union with China.

A successful invasion could garner immense domestic prestige for the Communist Party. It could also mean China supplants the U.S. as Asia’s dominant power. However, it could also lead to disaster, with China at war with the U.S. and its key allies, a conflict that would almost certainly convulse the global economy. Military failures could also threaten the party’s hold on power.

The outcome of a Chinese attack could depend heavily on the response of the United States, the island’s most important ally. For decades, the U.S. refused to say how it would react to an invasion, a policy dubbed “strategic ambiguity.”

President Joe Biden appeared to break with this policy, confirming on a number of occasions during his term that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan if it was attacked.

Asked about President Donald Trump’s position on Taiwan, a White House spokesman said: “The policy of the United States is to maintain Taiwan’s defensive capability relative to that of China. And as the president has said, Chairman Xi Jinping will not attack Taiwan while President Trump is in office.”

A portable port

Missing from the exercises that Reuters observed was a new temporary pier system launched in March, which renewed fears that China was continuing to prepare for an invasion. Instead, we saw vessels that match the older floating pier system that has not been spotted since 2023.

Assembled off a landing beach, big cargo ships and ferries could dock at these floating piers, speeding the unloading of troops, equipment and supplies.

The testing of this system suggests the PLA fears it might be unable to seize or prevent the demolition of Taiwan’s existing ports and cargo-handling facilities in the early phases of an invasion, according to military experts. Admiral Lee said vehicles and supplies could be driven from the roll-on, roll-off ships onto the floating piers and then directly onto land.

Satellite images show that during the August 23 exercise, the pier was assembled and then dismantled in about 3.5 hours. Vehicles clustered on the shore suggest it was at least briefly used to drive vehicles to the beach.

These pier systems can be set up quickly in ideal conditions, but weather, sea conditions and other logistics can introduce difficulties and delays. Multiple military experts pointed to the U.S. effort to build a temporary pier to deliver aid to Gaza last year. Construction took roughly three weeks, and the system had to be dismantled multiple times because of bad weather. In ideal conditions, U.S. officials told Reuters, the U.S. pier system can be operational within 24 hours.

‘Cognitive warfare’

One senior Taiwan defense official, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, questioned the viability of using civilian ferries and cargo ships in an invasion. The official said it would be nearly impossible for China to deploy landing craft like the ones Reuters observed during an invasion, because they would be vulnerable to small, portable weapons such as shoulder-fired missiles.

The official said China was waging “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan and its allies when it publicized reports of menacing landing exercises and amphibious assault rehearsals. The psychological impact was a “bigger threat” than the maneuvers demonstrated in the drills, the official said.

The sheer size of an invasion force, which would be difficult to hide, also presents a challenge for the PLA. Chinese military doctrine emphasises the use of deception to achieve surprise in warfare, according to Taiwanese and western experts.

One way to obscure such a force would be to launch an attack from many sites in China. Reuters observed several embarkation drills this summer where small vessels, likely amphibious assault vehicles, cruised from beaches through the water and entered ferries from a ramp at the back.

This means the PLA could load troops and armored vehicles from multiple beaches on the Chinese coast that had suitable road or rail connections. For troops storming Taiwan, these vehicles would provide crucial firepower and protection.

Taiwan’s defense ministry said in a report last month that China was honing its capacity to mount a surprise attack with its regular military exercises near the island. These drills could suddenly switch to active combat to catch Taiwan and its international allies off guard, the report said.

Chinese leaders value the element of surprise, according to a report by Ian Easton, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, who has studied the use of deception in Chinese military strategy.

Within hours of the August landing drills, the 12 shadow navy ships left the waters off the beach near Jiesheng, heading north. The ferries returned to civilian duty on their normal routes in the Bohai Sea. After the latest in this series of summer exercises, it remains uncertain if the PLA is prepared yet for an invasion if ordered to cross the Taiwan Strait.

“I don’t think anybody can definitively say, one way or another, are they ready now,” said Easton. “All war is a gamble, it’s always a gamble, and there’s always surprises. And it never goes as planned, for the attacker or for the defender.”