When people discuss risks in the Taiwan Strait, attention is usually directed toward military capabilities, strategic deployments, and external variables. Yet at a deeper structural level, whether war occurs is increasingly determined by how it is perceived and defined, rather than by concrete actions alone.
By Bi Yantao Published on May 22, 2026
I. The Intellectual Starting Point of War and Peace
The relationship between war and peace has never been solely a matter of military balance. It is also a competition between cognitive structures and interpretive frameworks.
The Preamble of the UNESCO Constitution states: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” This implies that conflict is first generated within ideas and cognition.
From this perspective, the risk structure of the Taiwan Strait issue is undergoing a subtle transformation: from focusing on actions themselves to focusing increasingly on how those actions are interpreted and defined.
Traditional analysis emphasizes military balance, strategic deployments, and external interventions. These factors constitute the material and structural conditions of conflict.
However, in complex interactive environments, the same behavior may be interpreted differently under different cognitive frameworks. The uncertainty of meaning itself is becoming a key variable in the evolution of the situation.
II. From Behavioral Conflict to Interpretive Conflict
In the evolution of conflict, what ultimately determines escalation toward war is not merely the occurrence of a specific action, but how that action is perceived and defined.
Under different interpretive structures, the same military or political move may be understood as deterrence, probing, miscalculation, or direct hostility. Such differences in perception directly affect assessments of the situation and subsequent decisions on escalation.
Mechanistically, whether war occurs depends on how behavior is perceived and defined, not solely on the behavior itself.
This process is often reflected through “escalation thresholds.” An escalation threshold refers to the integrated judgment of intent, risk, cost, and expected trajectory under a given context.
When an action is interpreted as crossing a security red line or constituting an intolerable threat, conflict may shift from limited confrontation to higher-intensity escalation.
III. Cognitive Thresholds and the Amplification of the Security Dilemma
This judgment process is not static but continuously self-reinforcing.
In high-tension environments, actors tend to interpret the behavior of others in increasingly negative terms, thereby strengthening their own defensive measures.
These defensive adjustments are then reinterpreted by the other side as signs of escalation, further reinforcing the original cognitive assessment.
This feedback loop extends the security dilemma beyond behavior into cognition itself, and it is continuously amplified through communication and information environments. This is what I previously referred to as the “cognitive security dilemma.”
Within this process, a particularly important phenomenon emerges: expectations about war themselves gradually become an influential variable in reality.
When the belief that “war is possible” becomes a default assumption, policy priorities shift from conflict prevention to conflict preparedness; communication space narrows, reducing the possibility of correcting misunderstandings; and long-term stability mechanisms may be replaced by short-term risk management logic.
IV. One-Way Convergence of Interpretive Space
A deeper issue lies in the one-way convergence of interpretive space. When analytical frameworks increasingly assume that conflict is inevitable, the system’s capacity to accommodate alternative possibilities declines.
Any signal of de-escalation may be reinterpreted as a tactical adjustment rather than a structural change. In such a context, uncertainty does not disappear; instead, it is uniformly encoded as high risk, thereby weakening systemic resilience.
The consequence of this structural shift does not immediately manifest as war, but rather as a reduction in available pathways. As policy and discourse increasingly organize around a single anticipated future, the multidimensionality of reality is compressed, and the system gradually loses its buffering capacity.
V. Conclusion: How Cognition Shapes Reality
Therefore, the risk in the Taiwan Strait does not exist only at the level of material behavior, but also at the level of cognitive structure. In a more fundamental sense, whether war occurs ultimately depends on how behavior is perceived and defined, rather than on behavior itself.
What deserves attention, then, is not only the trajectory of conflict itself, but whether the interpretive space surrounding it is becoming increasingly singular. As this space narrows, the range of real-world options also contracts. Such structural change may have longer-term consequences than any single event.
Bi Yantao is a professor at the School of International Communication and Arts, Hainan University, China and a senior research fellow at the Chahar Institute. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the positions of his affiliated institutions.
