NOVEMBER 25 — When Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae declared in the Diet that “Taiwan’s survival is directly connected to Japan’s own security,” she triggered more than a diplomatic ripple. She established a new structural reality – one in which Beijing is compelled to respond with both political clarity and technological urgency.
What followed was not merely rhetoric from China, but a comprehensive engineering simulation to determine whether Starlink, one of Taiwan’s most critical asymmetric assets, can be neutralised during a conflict.
This is the law of unintended consequences in motion. A political signal in Tokyo has produced a military-technical counteraction in Beijing, revealing the escalating layers of insecurity that now define East Asian geopolitics.
Starlink sits at the centre of this contest. Unlike traditional geo-stationary satellites that remain fixed above one location, Starlink’s low-Earth-orbit constellation moves rapidly, with terminals on the ground constantly shifting between satellites, beams, and frequencies.
That mobility – dynamic, adaptive, and decentralised – creates a communication architecture that is remarkably resistant to disruption.
It is precisely why Russia struggled to degrade Starlink in Ukraine. The system redirects itself: new beams, new satellites, new frequencies, often within seconds.
China’s researchers implicitly acknowledged this resilience. Their findings, published in recent technical reports, show that meaningful jamming of Starlink over Taiwan’s 36,000-square-kilometre territory would require between 1,000 and 2,000 coordinated jamming units – spread across mobile platforms, drones, and possibly airborne assets.
Taiwan’s mountainous topography blocks line-of-sight. The satellites keep moving. And to overpower Starlink transmissions, jammers must operate close to the user terminals, continuously tracking signals that refuse to stay still.
Put simply, China has admitted two uncomfortable truths. First, Starlink is very hard to switch off. And second, disabling it – even partially – would involve extraordinary engineering, financial, and operational costs. Any attempt to jam the entire network would be risky, time-sensitive, and highly escalatory.
The engineering implications are far-reaching. At the signal level, jamming attempts would aim to distort modulation, degrade link quality, and force continuous satellite handovers. At the network level, China would seek to slow down routing or create intermittent outages.
Yet Starlink’s constellation-wide capability to update software, boost transmission power, and reroute traffic via satellites outside the jamming zone means the system is built for adaptation. Every attack triggers a counter-adaptation, driving the competition upward.
This is where Takaichi Sanae’s statement becomes consequential.
By tying Japan’s security to Taiwan’s survival, she effectively linked Japan to any future effort to defend Starlink-dependent Taiwanese systems during a crisis. Beijing, in response, is adjusting its strategic assumptions: if Japan views Taiwan as part of its security perimeter, then China must anticipate Japan’s involvement and plan accordingly. The battlefield architecture, from China’s perspective, now includes Japan.
For Taiwan, the implications are sobering but manageable. Starlink can be disrupted, but not reliably. It can be degraded, but only at enormous cost. Taiwan must now build a redundancy-driven defence doctrine – combining hardened terminals, diversified networks, anti-jamming capabilities, and multi-layered fallbacks. No single system can be assumed to function seamlessly in a conflict.
For China, the simulation exposes a strategic dilemma of its own making. Large-scale jamming would risk interfering with China’s own radar, missile guidance, and communication systems. Thousands of jamming platforms would be vulnerable to Taiwanese air defences.
Worse, the perception that China is “weaponising commercial space” would accelerate US-Japan cooperation on LEO networks and drive undecided states closer to Washington.
Japan, too, cannot escape the consequences of its prime minister’s words. A jammed Starlink over Taiwan could disrupt Japanese coordination cells supporting Taiwan, forcing Tokyo to rapidly strengthen protected military satellite communications, electronic warfare resilience, and joint space-based command-and-control with the US Indo-Pacific Command. The cascade of responses shows that even one sentence from a newly appointed prime minister can reshape the region’s defence planning.
What emerges is a new regional reality: every move triggers a countermove, every statement prompts a simulation, and every simulation leads to new procurement plans. East Asia is quietly entering a technological arms race in the electromagnetic spectrum – one of the least visible yet most consequential fronts of the modern battlefield.
Ultimately, the competition over Starlink is not really about satellites; it is about the shrinking space for diplomacy. The risk is that Japan, China, and Taiwan may increasingly view electromagnetic warfare as inevitable. But once the spectrum becomes a battlefield, the entire region – willingly or not – gets pulled into the escalation spiral.
The lesson is clear. Engineering simulations, political declarations, and satellite constellations may shape the next crisis, but only sustained, principled diplomacy can prevent it. In a region where unintended consequences now define strategic behaviour, the cost of miscalculation is rising – and the margin for error is shrinking.
* Phar Kim Beng is Professor of Asean Studies, Director Institute of International and Asean Studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. Chin Jit Kai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering in the Universiti Teknologi Petronas.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
