Apparently feeling that he really should have said something about Taiwan during his meeting with President Trump in South Korea several weeks ago, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping brought it up in a recent phone call with Trump. That the Chinese government is being annoyed by Japan on this question may have been another motive to try to get the matter cleared up with the United States.
According to party-state news agency Xinhua, Xi stressed that the “return” of Taiwan to China is crucial to the current world order. “China and the United States once fought side by side against fascism and militarism, and should now work together to safeguard the outcomes of World War II,” he is supposed to have told Trump (The Straight Times, November 25, 2025).
Let’s hope Trump didn’t reply “well, fine then, you go ahead and conquer Taiwan and, on the basis of that specious reasoning, the U.S. will stay out of your way.”
If, despite all the risks, the People’s Republic of China does ultimately invade the Republic of China in hopes of adding Taiwan to its provinces, one of the many problems faced by the aggressor will be that of how to shut down the communications with which the ROC is conducting its defense.
Chinese researchers have published a study in Systems Engineering and Electronics concluding that it “it would take an extensive 1,000 to 2,000 airborne devices to effectively jam” a Starlink-satellite-based Internet during a war with Taiwan (Taipei Times, November 24, 2025).
The ROC government doesn’t currently have access to Starlink satellites. It tried to do a deal with Elon Musk in 2024, but things didn’t work out. The researchers’ analysis would presumably apply to any comparable satellite service as well as to a Starlink setup provided to meet a wartime emergency despite the lapse of past negotiations.
The Ukraine precedent
That it would be tough to jam the satellites is suggested by Starlink’s performance after Russia invaded Ukraine.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv quickly requested satellite Internet from founder Elon Musk, and thousands of Starlink terminals arrived within days, restoring command across the battlefield, despite Russia’s attempts to block communications, the paper reported.
Updates to SpaceX satellite configurations and software thwarted repeated jamming attempts by Russia, and the battlefield advantage shifted to Ukraine….
As Starlink uses thousands of low-orbit satellites, which can shift connections in seconds if one satellite is jammed, traditional ground-based jamming methods would not be sufficient to suppress the system, the study said.
The team found that China would need to deploy at least 935 small, synchronized airborne jammers carried by drones, balloons or aircraft that could form a wide electromagnetic barrier over the combat zone.
This would be able to suppress Starlink over an area of about 36,000km², about the size of Taiwan, the research said.
If lower-powered airborne jammers were used instead, it would require about 2,000 devices, it said.
While all these jammers were being deployed, the men of the ROC military would presumably not be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
