To start you’ll need a network of collaborators, sympathetic to your cause. Begin to erode public confidence until your target’s disillusionment is palpable. Add a siege. Then offer to negotiate. If you’ve followed steps one and two, a surrender, brokered by your collaborators, is all but guaranteed.
The Communists used a version of this recipe to defeat the Nationalists in Beijing, then called Beiping, during the Chinese civil war.
Almost 100 years later the so-called Beiping model is being talked about once more. This time by Chinese officials and state media who ponder whether it could be applied to Taiwan. If so, it means Xi Jinping could defeat the island without a shot being fired.
Alice Su, The Economist’s senior China correspondent, and Jeremy Page, our Asia diplomatic editor, ask: how is China laying the psychological groundwork for the Beiping model in Taiwan? And could it work?
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