Taiwan’s National Security Bureau went live on Sunday with a website inviting Chinese nationals to pass intelligence to Taipei, framing the channel as a secure outlet for what it describes as a growing pool of mainlanders fed up with the system. The pitch is unusually candid for a counterintelligence agency: the stated aim is to expand the bureau’s range of intelligence sources, and the bureau called on Chinese citizens at home or abroad to come forward and “make changes with courage.” For a service whose entire premise is discretion, advertising the sourcing operation in public is itself the message.

The Taiwan crisis is forecast as a future event. It is also a present event, conducted continuously across a spectrum of activity that does not produce headlines but does produce strategic effect. The grey zone war over Taiwan has been running for most of the last decade. Treating it as preliminary to the real war misses that the grey zone is the real war for now, and may remain so indefinitely.

The People’s Republic of China has been conducting a sustained campaign of pressure against Taiwan that falls below the threshold of armed attack and above the threshold of normal competitive statecraft. This gray zone — the space between peace and war where coercion operates through ambiguity, exhaustion, and the deliberate exploitation of thresholds — has been the primary arena of Chinese pressure on Taiwan for years and is the operating environment that Taiwan’s defense establishment spends more of its daily attention managing than any invasion scenario.

The most important battle in a Taiwan conflict may be fought before the first missile is launched, on platforms that do not appear in military order-of-battle assessments, by actors who are never uniformed and never identifiable. China’s information operations against Taiwan are not a supplement to its military strategy. They are the precondition for making the military strategy work. A Taiwanese population that has been sufficiently demoralized, divided, and confused about what is actually happening and who can be trusted is a population that provides less political support for resistance, less capacity for civil defense mobilization, and less coherent pressure on allied governments to intervene.