A Surfacing Strategy: Chinese Unconventional Oceanic Warfare

The evolution of maritime warfare has largely moved in expanding the form of conflict and the direction of it. Originating from largely surface conflict and eventually amphibious assaults, maritime conflict shifted to expanded domains, attacks from below by submarines and above by aircraft carriers. However, in the continued evolution of maritime conflict since World War II, various new technologies and strategies have shifted the way war is conducted, as well as preparations for war. This is reflected most clearly in the case of China and Chinese maritime expansion. Although it began and evolved by replicating traditional naval strategy, adopted from Soviet Union systems and adapted for Chinese needs and limitations, it has since evolved dramatically to employ a vast array of unconventional methods.

This article will analyze these unconventional methods, focusing centrally on China’s evolving systems and strategies, while also drawing parallels to other unconventional strategies of other nations. That said, this article is centrally focused on Chinese maritime strategy evolution and its ramifications. These tools, by examining an undercurrent of strategy applied to different facets of the undersea domain, establish an argument on Beijing’s military-civil infrastructure, through research vessels, cargo fleets, fishing boats, and autonomous drones. In such a way, this infrastructure operates without acting as a clear and present threat or exigency for war; rather, it functions simply as an inconvenience or mild concern, one which becomes increasingly threatening, despite not acting as an obviously military entity. The article is in turn divided into key sections, focused on military-civil fusion, submarine strategies, the role of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and anchor dragging.

The underwater domain has seen a disproportionate advancement in large part due to its modern nature. Submarines are highly technical weapons of war, and as a result, see the most significant growth and unconventional adaptations. China’s newest submarine, the Type 095 , is also referred to as a sail-less submarine because of its unique proportions, designed to be swifter and stealthier. These are, in fact, two separate hulls under parallel development rather than a single design: satellite imagery placed the Type 095 fitting out at the Bohai shipyard in Huludao in February 2026, sporting a conventional sail and a distinctive X-form rudder, while a separate, still-unnamed vessel of roughly 120 meters surfaced independently at Jiangnan Shipyard near Shanghai that June, evidence Beijing is now running simultaneous -generation attack-submarine programs across at least two yards. By reducing noise, it is able to better avoid acoustic detection systems, such as those employed by the U.S. and Japan’s ‘Fish Hook’ detection system , specifically surrounding the First Island Chain.

This development has followed a striking increase in Chinese submarine production, including a 2+1 production of nuclear attack submarines per year . The undersea domain is not limited to submarines specifically; however, for example, the mapping and data collection of the ocean floor work to enable submarine piloting. His data has been gathered throughout the Indo-Pacific region as well as the Arctic, through military-civil fusion doctrine , established by Xi Jinping as a national strategy, and has seen systematic incorporation. UUVs in particular have been deployed by Chinese vessels to map the seafloor, under the International Seabed Authority’s designation; however, these UUVs were found to spend only 6% of their time in these designated zones . Additionally, a majority of these vessels were found to be tied to state companies and were reported to have conducted suspicious activity. Such activity includes mapping undersea cable networks, potentially for sabotage purposes, as well as UUV data collection near the U.S. Pacific Submarine Fleet’s homeport in Guam .

This data collected under a scientific and civil guise has been reported to have been communicated with Chinese state systems such as the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Such data gathering under a civilian guise has been reflected in other reports, such as Chinese shipping systems, as recently as September 2026, wherein COSCO was accused of surveillance while transporting cargo. While the COSCO case has been denied publicly, the expansion of Chinese trade in the Arctic draws attention to such possibilities of espionage undertaken through trade, the very same trade which is expanding uniquely and without competition into the Arctic. These Arctic expeditions were preceded by years of icebreaker data recording . Such icebreakers are utilized with the technology required to map the saefloor and collect data to enable submarine piloting in the region. Buoys have been deployed with recording infrastructure to collect data in the Arctic, which has raised concern among Canadian officials .

Anchor dragging serves as a form of deep-sea sabotage unique to Russia and China, corresponding with seabed mapping. The maps of the seafloor enable a surgical strike specifically on undersea communications cables, such as those conducted in the Baltic and Taiwan . Anchor dragging and GUGI operations are unique because they specifically create kinetic conflict between nations with plausible deniability, and thereby not sparking any wars, while still acting in offensive operations.

There is also the case of shadow fleets to skirt sanctions, trade route chokepoints, Chinese sponsorship of pirates, fisherman harassment, the Batanes issues, so forth. The tools utilized by China rest not within traditional means of war but instead flow into a system of gray-zone maritime strategy adopted by Russia and China alike, to avoid open war. Through habituation, the subtle encroachment of Chinese vessels in waters around Taiwan, the Batans, and Alaska has slowly become accepted; Chinese actions, while never outright tolerated, have become increasingly accepted.

Russia’s shadow fleet illustrates such a case: after sanctions barred Russia’s traditional shipping fleets, the nation utilized other commercial ships for strategic ends. The assembled fleet is roughly 400 to 600 aging tankers, a range CSIS has independently tracked , which continue to transport the majority of Russia’s seaborne crude outside the reach of Western price caps, insurance regimes, and, of course, sanctions. These vessels sail under the guise of different nations, through shell-company ownership, and often without identification transponders- something paralleled in China’s expansion in the Arctic. China has also employed vessels without “functioning” transponders to deliver goods to the Arctic LNG 2, and reiterates the notion of commercial shipping as strategy.

The Shadow Fleet, as it’s come to be known, serves as an economic lifeline for the Kremlin as well as a weapon of war with no clear national association. The Eagle S. is a tanker flagged under the Cook Islands and linked to the shadow fleet; however, it was seized by Finnish authorities after dragging its anchor for 66 miles across the Gulf of Finland in December of 2024. This anchor dragging severed the Estlink 2 power cable as well as a number of telecommunications cables; another merchant vessel under the Hong Kong flag served the Baltic connector gas pipeline in October 2023. The Chinese-owned Yi Peng 3 also severed cables between Sweden and Lithuania in November 2024, dragging an anchor for nearly 300 kilometers. CBS News’s 60 Minutes has documented this Eagle S-Balticconnector-Yi Peng 3 sequence in detail, tracing each vessel’s anchor-drag track via satellite data. Russia retains a Main Directorate of Underwater Research, an operational force tied to a variety of undersea sabotage operations and missions, such as anchor dragging. Known by the Russian acronym GUGI, the directorate answers directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense, as opposed to participating in the Navy chain of command, as well as operating a vessel, the Yantar, equipped with submersibles capable of reaching the depths of undersea cables.

Western defense officials have tracked the Yantar loitering over transatlantic cable junctions from Ireland to the Baltic, per UK Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy monitoring reports , noting that the submersible remote-controlled vehicles are explicitly capable of tapping cables for intelligence, as well as laying explosives upon them for future sabotage. GUGI’s vessels deliberately survey and manipulate the seabed without an incident of any deliberate attack, under the guise of research and science, thus insulating any actions from sparking conflict. In other words, Russia’s strategy of a shadow fleet and research vessels conducting operations is an adoption of an existing Chinese strategy of military-civil fusion.

China’s undersea cable incidents work in tandem with the Russian operations- in 2025, a Togo-flagged vessel, the Hong Tai 58, crewed by Chinese personnel, loitered near the Taiwan-Penghu No. 3 cable, before releasing its anchor and serving the aforementioned cable. Taiwanese authorities detained the vessel and its captain in the aftermath of the incident. January of the same year saw a Cameroon-marked vessel, the Shunxin39, cut a cable near Keelung after loitering nearby, which Taiwan’s coast guard confirmed to be Chinese-owned despite its flag of convenience. Operations that rest just below the threshold to spark conflict, but work to erode and sabotage Western systems, degrading Western influence, power and regional capability.

China has employed commercial ships for espionage operations as well, with a Reuters 2026 report claiming that COSCO, the state-owned Chinese shipping conglomerate, has operated signals-intelligence equipment aboard its vessels, and thus collected military communications around the U.S., Europe, and throughout Asia, which U.S. officials confirmed to Reuters on the condition of anonymity. Correspondingly, the Pentagon had previously added COSCO to a list of companies linked to the Chinese military in January of 2025, per the Department of Defense’s Section 1260H designation ,- the same year a U.S. Naval War College report concluded the PLA was utilizing China’s commercial fleets for intelligence. The Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute detailed the fishing fleet’s intelligence role specifically , identifying trained specialists embedded within militia crews. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law (Article 7, per China Law Translate’s official English translation ) obliges Chinese state firms to assist state intelligence work when asked, in part fueling military-civil fusion doctrine, and providing Beijing with endless strategic assets for use across the world.

China’s maritime militia operates in the South China Sea to project state power through civilian forces; it is power projection through influence that is present, if in a non-evidently violently. The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia act as civilian operators under governmental action, and utilize civilian boats, based primarily out of Hainan, which harass rival claimants and foreign naval vessels. As such, Beijing is not acting as a provocative, aggressive nation, but rather a nation that utilizes proxy forces, without sparking conflict.

Philippine officials have documented repeated incidents in which Chinese Coast Guard vessels, side by side with maritime militia boats, weaponized water cannons against Filipino fishing boats near Scarborough Shoal in December of 2025. The Philippines’ Batanes Islands have also seen increased Chinese aggression through diplomatic actions, as well as the Armed Forces of the Philippines has tracked a persistent presence of Chinese research vessels working around the Bashi Channel, akin to the Chinese UUV operations near Guam. UUVs, are alone, outside of their data collection, act as novel weapons of war- seen through AUVs and remote-controlled UUVs, or gliders. These systems include the AJX002, an extra-large UUV or XLUUV, which was synthesized for the strategic purposes of minelaying, particularly in and around the First Island Chain. The undersea drones that were functioning primarily for surveillance have been designed for military and destructive purposes. The AJX002 has been paired with the HSU100, a reconnaissance variant of an XLUUV fitted with retractable masts, to turn the vessel into a glider design from an AUV, for long-range intelligence-gathering expeditions. Beijing has also experimented with at least five XLUUV designs; several are capable of ferrying torpedoes and mines across the ocean. These play a kinetic role in the prior wall of intelligence that detected submarines and underwater actions through the Underwater Great Wall, a network of seabed sensors, now utilizing long-range gliders, autonomous UUVs, and newly defended by military UUVs. The civilian seabed-mapping campaign using UUVs aforementioned only strengthens this notion of military-civil fusion, particularly utilized by UUVs and enabled by AI technology.

Additionally, this minelaying strategy, if deployed by a “research” expedition around Taiwan, would lead to a critical blockade crucial to overtaking the island nation. Should these mines be planted weeks or months in advance around chokepoints or ports, or planted subtly by UUVs, China would hold a keen advantage in the waters around the strait and island. While the captains of vessels can be detained and prosecuted, uncrewed drones, if unflagged or operating under a guise, such legal action cannot be successfully prosecuted.

Overall, the strategies of submarines, anchor-dragging, sanctions-evading, maritime militias, and autonomous underwater drones create an overarching image of Chinese unconventional means of warfare. While each act and method is uniquely deniable and non-escalatory by design, the culmination of each method of power projection creates a strong Chinese presence in the Indo-Pacific and Arctic regions, without a single warship present. Tankers with drag anchors across critical cables fly under false flags, while research vessels operate with designated permits, and a system of undersea infrastructure designed for submarine enabling and detection alike. Each development in this system of maritime power projection builds upon a structure that has already, evidently, been established. In such a way, the slow and subtle habituation to Chinese operations in the world’s oceans, through a civilian cover with military means, establishes a status quo wherein Chinese operations are capable from the Baltic to the Bashi Channel.

Western and allied responses have been primarily reactive, at the time of writing. NATO’s Baltic Sentry was launched in January 2025 to better patrol the undersea infrastructure in the Baltic, in large part a response to the Russian cable-cutting. However, there is no standing international posture to counter gray-zone maritime activity as a unified strategy, as it appears to be. Such an asymmetry of action- the limited responses of the West compared to wide options for Chinese engagement- is a critical design of the unconventional strategy. As Beijing’s own investment shifts from crewed research vessels toward uncrewed platforms like the AJX002, the political cost of coercion will only continue to fall, and the window for building deterrence around attribution, rather than around the presence of a detainable crew, is closing.

Jack Lindstrom is a graduate researcher from the University of California, San Diego, pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs. He is also a junior researcher for the Mackinder Forum, where he conducts research on great power strategy and historical shifts of international competition.

Featured image: The BRP Cabra of the Philippine Coast Guard and two vessels of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources approaches Chinese-flagged ships at Whitsun Reef (known as Julian Felipe Reef in the Philippines) during maritime patrol operations. (Wikimedia Commons)

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