Cyber carnage, ‘service killer’ missiles and a hi-tech nuclear Armageddon. This is the terrifying new conflict that is drawing ever nearer – and why it would make Ukraine seem like a picnic: IAN WILLIAMS

A military blockade under cover of a ‘search and rescue’ operation. Hackers bring down the financial system. And an outlying island is seized by insurmountable force.

These are the opening scenes of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan, as depicted in a ten-part series made for Taiwanese television. There is panic on the streets as saboteurs trigger bombs and fake news floods the hijacked airwaves. Meanwhile, Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army prepares to storm the beaches.

Zero-Day Attack aired in Taiwan this summer. The trailer alone clocked up more than a million views. The Chinese government accused Taiwan of using the show to ‘peddle anxieties and attempting to provoke war’.

Nothing like this had been shown before on Taiwanese television and it is now widely seen as a wakeup call; an attempt to raise awareness about the urgency and impact of the threat across the Taiwan Strait.

But if anything, I fear the drama will have understated the seriousness of any such invasion.

If China attacked its neighbour, the threat to the global economy and to the bruised Western alliance would make Russia’s long war in Ukraine look like a picnic. And although it is half a world away, the UK could be drawn more directly to a conflict in Taiwan than to the muddy fields of the Donbas.

Taiwan is a vital cog in the global high-tech economy. It produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced semi-conductors. One Taiwanese company, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, also known as Foxconn, is the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, including of most Apple products. Bloomberg Economics has estimated that a war over the island would cost the global economy around $10trillion (£7.56trillion) – about 10 per cent of the world’s GDP.

For years, America has been supporting Taiwan’s defences and bolstering regional alliances to deter Chinese aggression. Now, not only has Donald Trump ushered in a new era of unpredictability, but his counterpart Xi Jinping is growing increasingly impatient, stepping up his military intimidation of the democratic, self-ruled island, which China claims as its own.

Xi sees taking Taiwan as a key part of his mission to restore national greatness, an eerily similar mission to that of his ‘good friend’ Vladimir Putin, which drives the Russian dictator’s aggression on Ukraine.

Xi is closely watching the West’s faltering resolve in Ukraine. If Putin is rewarded with territory for his aggression, that will factor into Beijing’s calculations.

This is why a phone call between Xi and Trump this week attracted so much attention and raised questions about America’s commitment both to the defence of Taiwan and to its regional alliances.

The Americans say the call came from Xi, while Beijing claims Trump initiated it. The US President says ‘many topics’ were discussed, while China insists the focus was Taiwan.

To me, the call between the world’s two most powerful men appears to have been an attempt by Xi to get Trump to rein in Japan, whose feisty new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has thrown a spanner in the works of Xi’s ambitions by suggesting an attack on Taiwan would trigger a military response from Japan.

According to Chinese reports, Xi reminded Trump that the US and China had jointly fought ‘fascism and militarism’ during the Second World War. The message was clear: if Trump wants better relations with Beijing, he should put Japan back in its box and allow China to have its way with Taiwan.

No doubt Xi will also have watched Trump’s attempts to wash his hands of Ukraine by foisting on Kyiv a peace plan that largely gives Moscow what it wants. Xi must be calculating that this transactional American President could similarly be persuaded to abandon Taiwan as part of a mutually beneficial trade deal.

Takaichi, who styles herself on Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, has been more direct than any previous post-war Japanese leader in voicing Tokyo’s security interests and its willingness to come to the defence of Taiwan, an island that Japan ruled between 1895 and 1945.

Earlier this month, she suggested a Chinese attack could create a scenario that would require Japan’s forces to respond.

Beijing reacted furiously to Takaichi’s remarks by hitting Tokyo with trade sanctions and curtailing travel by Chinese citizens to Japan. It sent warships into disputed waters and military drones close to Japanese territory.

Takaichi’s comments were ‘not just dangerously provocative but fundamentally perverse’, growled the China Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, warning that a clash between Japan and China ‘could quickly spiral into a large-scale conflict with unimaginable consequences’.

It released a video showing a simulated attack on Japanese ships and other targets using China’s latest hypersonic missiles.

Trump reportedly phoned Takaichi after his call with Xi and suggested she ‘temper’ her remarks, to which the Japanese PM replied that she was only articulating a long-standing position.

She refused to retract her comments, and Tokyo is pushing ahead with plans to place surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni, a Japanese-controlled island 70 miles east of Taiwan.

How quickly things have changed. Only a month ago, Trump praised Takaichi for being ‘tough’ on defence. The two leaders stood side by side on an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening ties in response to an ‘unprecedented severe security environment’.

America has long had a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ towards the defence of Taiwan. It does not explicitly state that the US will help should China attack, but Washington ‘considers any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means… a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States’.

The stakes, then, couldn’t be higher. Under Xi, China has conducted increasingly large military exercises, routinely sending waves of fighter jets towards Taiwan and deploying warships to simulate a blockade of the island, as well as practising for an invasion.

Internet cables linking Taiwan to its outlying islands have been repeatedly cut, and the country has faced a barrage of cyber-attacks and disinformation. In one incident, Chinese hackers took over digital information screens in Taiwan’s extensive network of 7-Eleven convenience stores, using them to spew out Communist Party propaganda.

One recent exercise deployed an armada of civilian ships, including even car ferries, to practise delivering troops and military equipment in a kind of perverse, 21st-century Dunkirk.

Ferries pouring out of Chinese shipyards must now be dual-use, with the ability to carry tanks and other heavy kit. A fleet of barge-like ships, designed for bringing vast quantities of military supplies ashore quickly, are under construction.

Much of China’s vast expansion and modernisation of its armed forces in recent years – on a scale rarely seen in peacetime – are focused on taking Taiwan by force and deterring America from joining the battle.

Its new ‘carrier-killer’ missiles are designed to take out US aircraft carriers, and others are capable of reaching US bases in the region.

These bases have been targeted by ‘sleeper’ malware – cyber weapons pre-installed in infrastructure and capable of sabotaging systems in the run-up to war. China is also rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal – the implicit message being that any conflict will not be contained to the region and would lead to Armageddon. For its part, the US has deployed special forces to train Taiwanese troops and is undertaking a fundamental rethink of its military stance in the region. An agreement has been signed with the Philippines, providing America with access to a string of bases in any future conflict.

As for Britain, earlier this year, a UK Carrier Strike Group including the HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier, visited Japan, joining drills that also involved the US and Australia.

A British F-35B fighter jet landed on a Japanese ship as part of what the Royal Navy described as ‘a major show of allied strength in the Indo-Pacific’.

When a British frigate sailed through the Taiwan Strait alongside a US destroyer in order to assert navigation rights, Beijing angrily accused them of ‘trouble-making and provocation’.

Britain, alongside America and Australia, is a member of the Aukus security pact, a multi-billion-pound deal to cooperate on submarines and other advanced technology, designed to counter China’s growing presence in the Indo-Pacific. A particular focus is the South China Sea, claimed in almost its entirety by China and through which a third of world trade flows.

Taiwan itself announced this week an extra $40billion (£30billion) in defence spending to cover missiles, drones and a new multi-layered missile defence system called T-Dome, inspired by Israel’s famous Iron Dome. ‘There is no room for compromise on national security,’ Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te said.

Estimates vary, but it is assumed that in the event of an invasion anything between 300,000 and 2million Chinese combat troops, along with thousands of tanks, artillery pieces, rocket launchers and armoured personnel carriers would need to cross the Taiwan Strait. It would be an operation of unprecedented size and complexity, dwarfing the D-Day landings of 1944.

Perhaps Taiwan’s most important allies are its geography and the climate of the Taiwan Strait, which make it a defender’s dream. Only 14 beaches are regarded as suitable for amphibious landing. Most of the east coast is sheer cliffs, while the west coast is lined with densely populated towns, mud flats, paddies and hard-to-navigate coastal ponds.

Then there are the treacherous waters and winds of the strait, known locally as the ‘Black Ditch’, which means there are only two brief realistic windows for an invasion every year – late March to the end of April, or late September to the end of October.

This is why a full-scale invasion was once derided as the ‘million-man swim’, since few believed the Chinese navy had the means to pull it off. Taiwanese strategists I spoke to likened China’s efforts to cross the strait in force to Russia’s humiliation on the road to Kyiv at the start of its invasion of Ukraine.

‘The Taiwan Strait is actually the highway for the Chinese army, where they are most vulnerable,’ one told me.

Nevertheless, US analysts believe Xi has set a deadline of 2027 for his military to be capable of taking Taiwan.

But gambling on an invasion would be an existential risk for Xi. While taking Taiwan is central to his mission for the ‘rejuvenation’ of China, to try and then fail would certainly end his rule – and possibly that of the Party itself.

Recent large-scale purges of the People Liberation Army, including in the elite Rocket Force and in units key to any invasion, have also raised doubts among Western experts as to whether the PLA is up to the task, in spite of its shiny new kit.

Xi might prefer to force Taiwan to give up without a fight – dubbed the ‘Anaconda Strategy’, after the snake that squeezes its prey to death – but that is unlikely. Taiwan has its own ‘Porcupine Strategy’ to make itself very painful to swallow. This borrows on Ukraine’s experience – a doctrine of asymmetric warfare, designed to frustrate a much bigger and more powerful adversary. The tools of the porcupine are small, mobile and highly resilient weapon systems, from drones to smart mines and precision missiles.

There is a joke in the capital Taipei that asks what are the three most important elements to life, to which the answer comes, water, air… and Taiwanese chips. It used to be told with some bravado, but on my summer visit there was a growing air of trepidation that this ‘silicon shield’ might be insufficient to ward off Chinese aggression – and Trump’s indifference. The island was still smarting from the imposition of US tariffs.

During my visit, an urgent alert flashed on my mobile phone: ‘Missile Attack. Seek Urgent Shelter.’ It was a civil defence drill, during which the streets of one of Asia’s most vibrant cities are suddenly deserted, silent but for the sound of distant sirens. And this year, it seemed to have a greater urgency.

Xi will have noted the way Putin has been able to play Trump like a fiddle, and there should be no surprise that the Chinese leader wants to join that orchestra.

• Ian Williams is author of Vampire State: The Rise And Fall Of The Chinese Economy, a new edition of which was published in August