Lesson 4: Chinese Spacepower Theory and Gray Zone Competition

Start with the provocation

"The coming war with China will be fought for control of outer space. Although its effects will be widely felt, the conflict itself will not be visible to those looking up into the night sky. It will not be televised. Most will not even be aware it is occurring. It may already have begun."

— Everett Dolman, New Frontiers, Old Realities (2010)

Dolman wrote that fifteen years ago. Read the current Secure World Foundation assessment, or the U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations' public testimony, and the assessment has not changed — it has only become more urgent. US Space Command has acknowledged that American space infrastructure is under "low-threshold attack every day." Chinese and Russian forces conduct reconnaissance missions that senior Space Force leaders describe as "battlefield prep" activities.

The war Dolman described as possibly already begun is not a war of kinetic antisatellite weapons — not yet. It is a war of positioning, norming, blurring, and probing. To understand what that means operationally, you need to understand how China thinks about space competition. That is what this lesson covers.

The foundational doctrine: informationized warfare

China's military theory for the past two decades has been organized around the concept of "local wars under informatized conditions" — a phrase attributed to Hu Jintao and formalized in PLA training doctrine. The central argument: the future of military competition is not about who has more tanks or bombers, but about who can gather, convey, analyze, and act on information faster than the adversary.

Space is the foundation of informatized warfare. Satellites provide the reconnaissance, navigation, timing, and communications that enable precision strike, coordinated operations, and real-time battlefield management. A military that can see and a military that is blind are not fighting the same war.

The implication for Chinese strategy is straightforward: attack space first. Degrade the adversary's ability to see, navigate, and coordinate before kinetic conflict begins, and the kinetic phase — if it happens at all — will be conducted against a disoriented, poorly coordinated force. The Science of Military Strategy (2013) is explicit that space and cyber operations are primary components of the campaign to establish information dominance before armed conflict.

This is why Chinese space strategy cannot be understood as simply an effort to match U.S. capabilities satellite-for-satellite. It is a campaign to erode U.S. information advantages in the event of a conflict, conducted below the threshold of armed conflict, over years and decades.

Unrestricted warfare: the theoretical framework

Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare (1999) is not an official PLA doctrinal document. It is better understood as a theoretical provocation — two PLA colonels arguing that the United States' overwhelming conventional military superiority had forced China to think asymmetrically.

Their central argument:

"Warfare which transcends all boundaries and limits, in short: unrestricted warfare. If this name becomes established, this kind of war means that all means will be in readiness, that information will be omnipresent, and the battlefield will be everywhere. It means that all weapons and technology can be superimposed at will, it means that all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed."

Unrestricted Warfare enumerates the tools: psychological warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, legal warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare. Space is treated as part of the "network space" that enables all other forms of warfare. The relevant implication for your curriculum: Chinese strategic thinking does not distinguish between military space operations and other forms of competition the way U.S. doctrine does. A Chinese commercial satellite company providing imagery to a third party in a conflict zone is not a civilian actor doing a commercial thing — it is a component of an integrated competitive strategy. (This happened: Chinese commercial satellite imagery companies were sanctioned by the United States for providing satellite imagery and assistance to the Wagner Group during Russia's war in Ukraine.)

Wargame relevance: A wargame that models Chinese actions as only military actions misses most of what Chinese strategy actually involves. The action space for a Chinese player in a realistic orbital competition game includes legal maneuvering, commercial positioning, norm-shaping, and economic dependency creation — not just ASAT deployment.

The Three Warfares

The PLA's "Three Warfares" doctrine formalizes three non-kinetic competition modes that operate continuously — in peacetime, crisis, and war:

Legal warfare (法律战): Using international law and legal arguments as a competitive tool. The goal is to constrain adversary action through legal claims while preserving maximum Chinese freedom of maneuver. China's near-space claim is a direct application: PLA writing since 2011 has argued that airspace between 20 km and 100 km altitude is a "legal blank that needs to be filled urgently" — and that China should define what norms apply there before the United States does. If China successfully establishes near-space as a legally cognizable zone with its own rules, it gains the ability to contest U.S. access to that altitude band on legal grounds.

The South China Sea islands analogy is instructive: China built islands, declared them territorial, and then argued that challenging their status was a violation of Chinese sovereignty. The analogous play in space is to establish presence, declare legal norms that legitimize that presence, and then argue that adversary response is the illegal act.

Psychological warfare (心理战): Shaping adversary decision-maker perceptions and will. In space, this includes demonstrating counterspace capabilities (ASAT tests, co-orbital maneuvers near adversary satellites, proximity operations) to signal that U.S. space assets are vulnerable — without actually attacking them. The goal is to induce risk aversion in U.S. planning: if planners believe their satellites are vulnerable, they may pull back from operations that depend on space assets, even without an actual attack.

Public opinion warfare (舆论战): Shaping the international narrative about the legitimacy of each side's space activities. China's advocacy for the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space (PPWT) treaty — while simultaneously developing ASAT capabilities — is public opinion warfare: it positions China as the responsible party and the United States as the obstacle to arms control. As Carlson's Spacepower Ascendant notes bluntly: "their charade of good will is nothing more than a brazen act of lawfare; an attempt to trick the West into agreeing to forego defending our space systems upon which our militaries, economic centers, and information driven societies depend."

Civilian-military blur: no private space sector in China

No nation-state has mastered the blending of commercial and military space operations as thoroughly as China. Chinese space agencies have a "proven record of space-based achievements" — and these agencies blur the line between civilian and military operations in ways that have no U.S. equivalent.

In the United States, SpaceX is a private company. It can choose to provide or withhold service. It is accountable to shareholders, not the PLA. In China, the distinction between civilian and commercial space companies and the military is legally thin and politically nearly nonexistent. Any capability the Chinese civilian space sector has could be militarized on short notice.

Specific examples:

Guowang / Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellations: China is constructing LEO megaconstellations that are direct counterparts to Starlink. China's central government has identified commercial space as "of key strategic value." These constellations serve commercial purposes — broadband, direct-to-device connectivity — and also provide PLA with organic communications and ISR capacity that does not depend on government-owned satellites.

Commercial imaging: Chinese commercial satellite imagery companies now produce high-resolution imagery competitive with U.S. commercial providers. The sanctioned companies that provided imagery to Wagner Group in Ukraine were operating as commercial entities. The dual-use nature is not incidental — it is architectural.

Reusable launch vehicles: China's private companies are developing reusable launch vehicles similar to SpaceX's. The U.S. Space Force has raised concerns about this capability as a space security issue — reusable launch enables rapid replenishment of satellite constellations after conflict, changing the deterrence calculus.

ITU filings as orbital positioning warfare

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) coordinates radio frequency spectrum and orbital slot assignments globally. For geostationary orbit, specific longitudinal positions are assigned to specific national operators. For non-geostationary orbits (LEO, MEO), the principle is "first-come, first-served": file a network with specific parameters, complete required coordination with potentially affected operators, then launch within the deadline to "bring the network into use" and establish priority.

China has used this administrative system with the same strategic intentionality it applies to near-space legal claims and South China Sea island-building.

The filing scale: China's state-owned Guowang constellation has filed with the ITU for 12,992 satellites. The Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation has filed for an additional 13,000+ satellites. Together, these filings stake claims to a large fraction of the most commercially valuable LEO frequency bands and altitude shells — particularly the 1,200 km shell where low latency and broad coverage intersect, the same shell where Starlink operates. Both SpaceX and Chinese operators have filed active adversarial coordination requests against each other at the ITU — formal legal proceedings that will determine who operates at scale in contested bands.

The reservation-before-use strategy: ITU filings are public records. China has filed satellite networks under names that don't correspond to known operational programs — essentially reserving spectrum and orbital capacity against future deployment. The ITU's "bring into use" deadline requires launching some satellites to establish priority, but does not require launching the full constellation. A few launched satellites locks the filing for the rest. This is a bureaucratic positional strategy: claim the orbital capacity before competitors can, at far lower cost than actually deploying the constellation.

Why this is Three Warfares applied to orbital infrastructure: No weapons. No OST violations. No diplomatic controversy comparable to an ASAT test. Just the aggressive, early use of an international administrative process to pre-empt competitor access to orbital resources. The legal warfare dimension is direct: by filing first, China can object to competitors' subsequent filings as "interfering with prior-coordinated networks" — turning its own filing position into a legal basis for blocking U.S. commercial constellation expansion.

The South China Sea analogy is exact: occupy the territory and establish legal claims before the international community can coordinate a norm against it. The Spratly Island chain and the ITU filing ledger are different in medium but identical in strategic logic.

The spectrum scarcity constraint: Unlike terrestrial land, the orbital environment is genuinely scarce in specific ways. The most valuable communication frequencies (Ka-band, Ku-band, V-band) have finite capacity in a given orbital shell — too many satellites in the same band at similar altitudes create interference. ITU coordination is the mechanism for managing that scarcity. A state that aggressively preempts those bands through early filing constrains what future operators (including U.S. commercial and military operators) can do in those bands without coordination agreement from the prior filer — which China can withhold.

Implication for wargame design: A wargame of orbital competition that only models kinetic and electronic counterspace misses the ITU-filing vector entirely. The action space for a realistic Chinese player includes administrative actions — filing, coordination objection, delayed coordination response — that achieve positional advantage without any observable orbital behavior. These actions are invisible to SSA sensors and produce no TLE signatures. They are, however, detectable in public ITU filing records. A commercial SDA product that monitors ITU filing activity alongside TLE history provides a more complete picture of adversary orbital strategy than one that monitors only observable orbital behavior.

The gray zone wargame: what China actually does

Dugger's "Space as a Gray Zone" (2024) describes a wargame involving senior DoD, State Department, NASA, and intelligence officials. The findings are instructive:

"Role-players acting as China were able to present the United States and her allies with a problem for which there failed to materialize an actionable solution — by quietly positioning civilian spacecraft onto orbital trajectories that could threaten US military position, navigation, and timing or communications satellites. They were then able to reinforce their own positions by quickly launching low-cost and disposable bodyguard satellites to protect their own assets from being threatened in retaliation."

Several things about this wargame outcome are worth unpacking.

Civilian spacecraft: The threatening assets are commercial or civilian in designation. Responding to them militarily requires the U.S. to either accept the threat or take action against a "civilian" spacecraft — triggering the international law and public opinion warfare dimensions simultaneously.

Disposable bodyguard satellites: Low-cost satellites that can absorb an attack, protecting the valuable asset while generating debris. This makes the U.S. response to the threatening satellite more costly and creates a debris problem that damages the U.S. as well.

No actionable solution materialized: This is the key finding. The wargame was played by senior officials. They could not find a response to China's positioning strategy. The gray zone worked.

The implication is direct: the problem your ML models are addressing — detecting anomalous maneuvers, attributing behavior, classifying intent — is the decisive competitive problem in this gray zone environment. The United States and its allies need to see the game before it ends. That requires behavioral detection and attribution capabilities that do not currently exist at the speed and scale that orbital operations demand.

Hal Brands on the structure of the competition

Hal Brands (Lessons From the New Cold War, 2024) synthesizes the U.S.-China competition with observations that directly affect how you frame the wargaming problem.

The rivalry is about coalitions: "The US-China rivalry is about coalition-making and coalition-breaking, and the outcome is too much in doubt." In space, this means the competitive landscape is not U.S. vs. China — it is U.S. + allies vs. China + partners, with a set of neutral/swayable states whose alignment affects access to launch infrastructure, orbital slots, and international norms.

There is no grand bargain: "Outside analysts, and some government officials, have periodically proposed purchasing Sino-American peace by trading Taiwan or the South China Sea away. They might as well save their energy." Applied to space: there is no negotiated arms control agreement that resolves the competition. The OST is already the existing framework and it does not prevent any of the capabilities China has developed. Space competition will continue regardless of diplomatic initiatives.

China's overreach creates coalition opportunities: Brands notes that "its autocratic ambition and aggression were driving potential victims together." In space terms: Chinese behavior (ASAT tests, proximity operations to allies' satellites, imagery for Wagner Group) has driven allied space cooperation — the Five Eyes SSA sharing agreements, NATO Space COE, allied ISR coordination — that would not otherwise exist. Chinese gray zone operations create their own deterrent by making the coalition case for allied space cooperation.

This is not the Cold War: "One world" is no longer possible. The infrastructure, economic relationships, and technological dependencies are deeply intertwined in ways the U.S.-Soviet competition was not. Chinese commercial space companies serve Western customers. U.S. chip manufacturers depend on Chinese raw materials. The competition takes place inside a web of economic interdependence that makes the "unrestricted warfare" framework more, not less, applicable — because the economic and commercial dimensions are genuine vectors of competition.

The South China Sea as strategic template

Carlson's Spacepower Ascendant draws the South China Sea analogy explicitly:

"If space is viewed by China the same way that it sees those islands, then cooperation cannot occur since the Chinese government cannot be trusted to act in good faith."

The SCS pattern is: assert presence, build infrastructure that encodes legal claims, deploy military capabilities under civilian cover, and then argue that any response is destabilizing. The islands were described as for "peaceful purposes" before they became military air bases with anti-air and anti-ship missiles.

The analogous space pattern: China's Shijian co-orbital inspection satellites are described as for on-orbit servicing research. The Guowang constellation is described as commercial broadband. The near-space altitude claim is framed as filling a legal vacuum for peaceful uses.

Klein's Fight for the Final Frontier generalizes the point: "Historical experience should teach policy makers and strategists that a less-capable power's space strategy is likely to be indirect and cumulative." The South China Sea was won incrementally, through fait accompli after fait accompli, none of which individually rose to the level requiring a U.S. military response. The cumulative effect was a Chinese-controlled sea lane.

The question for your thesis: can ML-enabled behavioral detection move fast enough to identify the pattern before the cumulative fait accompli is complete?

Wargame design implications

A wargame designed to explore U.S.-China orbital competition must capture several features that standard two-player zero-sum games miss:

The civilian ambiguity problem: Chinese assets are not cleanly military or civilian. A game that forces a binary "military/civilian" classification misses the strategic value of ambiguity. You need to model assets with uncertain status and defender rules of engagement that reflect the real decision: how much proof of hostile intent is required before action?

The long game: Chinese strategy is cumulative and indirect. A game with a fixed short time horizon misses the dynamics of gradual positioning. The CFR solver finds equilibria for a fixed game structure — the strategic problem of defining the game structure to capture long-horizon cumulative strategy is a design challenge that precedes the algorithm.

The coalition dimension: A multi-player game (U.S., China, allies, neutral commercial operators) captures the coalition dynamics that matter. PSRO (Module 6) is the right tool for this — it handles heterogeneous actor populations better than two-player Nash equilibrium.

The Three Warfares as action space: Legal, psychological, and public opinion actions should be in the action space alongside kinetic and electronic counterspace. This expands the game dramatically but reflects the actual competition.

What you need to be able to do

After this lesson, you should be able to:

• Explain the PLA concept of "informationized warfare" and why space is foundational to it
• Describe the three components of Qiao Liang's Unrestricted Warfare argument and explain how they apply to space competition
• Name the Three Warfares (legal, psychological, public opinion) and give a specific space domain example of each
• Explain the civilian-military blur in Chinese space operations and why it creates strategic problems for the U.S.
• Describe what the gray zone wargame (Dugger 2024) found and why it matters for behavioral detection requirements
• Apply the South China Sea template to Chinese space strategy: what does fait accompli look like in the orbital domain?
• Explain Brands' coalition dynamics argument and its implication for how to structure a multi-actor space competition wargame
• Explain how ITU megaconstellation filings function as orbital positioning warfare and why this vector is invisible to SSA sensors but detectable in public records
• Describe the spectrum scarcity constraint and why pre-emptive ITU filing creates a legal basis for blocking competitor operations in contested bands