TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A tabletop simulation of a Chinese attack on Taiwan showed that Taipei and Japan needed to establish closer and more efficient communication channels, reports said Tuesday (Aug. 1).

The Japan Forum for Strategic Studies (JFSS) hosted the event in Tokyo on July 15-16. While the exercise turned out in a defeat for China, Taiwanese academics who attended said Japan really valued the situation in Taiwan as well as international law, per CNA.

The tabletop simulation set a Chinese blockade and invasion attempt of Taiwan in 2027, because that year fell at the halfway mark for Japan’s three key national security strategy documents, valid for 10 years and most recently adjusted in 2022. The date did not refer to a potential timing of the invasion ahead of the 2028 elections, said Lee Ting-sheng (李廷盛), deputy CEO at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR).

He said the main aim of the simulation was to test whether the strategy would succeed in safeguarding regional peace and stability, and whether Japan’s defense plans were adequate to respond to a crisis. The Japanese military experts were also eager to learn what Taiwan was thinking, Lee said.

The tabletop exercise also showed that the current channels of communications between Taiwan and Japan, going through their mutual representative offices, were not sufficiently adequate for an emergency situation, INDSR assistant research fellow Alice Yang (楊長蓉) said. A more direct and efficient way of communicating should be established, according to participants in the exercise.

The academics also warned that the war on the battlefield would be preceded by cyberwarfare. A cyber attack would be large-scale, and not limited to military targets, but also include underwater cables, public transport, broadcaster NHK, influential business groups like Mitsubishi, and government departments, Lee said. Yang pointed out that due to different legislation, countermeasures would vary from country to country, leaving doubts about their effectiveness.

Another factor in the JFSS tabletop exercise was how to manage the evacuation of Japanese citizens from China and Taiwan. China counted more than 300,000 Japanese nationals at 13,000 Japanese businesses, while Taiwan also counted a considerable number of Japanese, with people living on small Japanese islands near Taiwan also likely to be evacuated. There was a need to calculate how many ships and planes Japan would need to conduct a successful operation, Lee said.