Dissipative warfare is no longer just a theoretical curiosity in PLA journals; it is moving into practice. Chinese military writers associated with the intelligentized warfare paradigm describe dissipative warfare (耗散战) as a method of winning by maintaining order in one’s own system while deliberately increasing disorder in an adversary’s political, economic, and military networks — a shift from killing enemy forces to degrading enemy coherence. Wang Ronghui’s analysis for the Jamestown Foundation frames it explicitly as a “new strategy in the AI era,” where victory hinges on controlling systemic entropy rather than massing steel.

When you apply that lens to the last year of Chinese behavior toward Japan, the pattern starts to look like a textbook field exercise. Congressional Research Service work on the East and South China Seas has already flagged PLA maritime operations around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands as a sustained gray-zone campaign blending coast guard, naval, and air assets in ways that stress Japanese responses without triggering open war. Recent Reuters reporting on confrontations near the islands — including the December 2 incident in which both sides claimed to have “driven out” the other’s vessels — shows how this pressure now plays out almost weekly in real time.

China is using dissipative warfare here because it matches the stakes: a historically fraught relationship, an increasingly assertive Japanese security policy, and Tokyo’s willingness to speak openly about responding militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In that environment, calibrated entropy is more useful to Beijing than a decisive clash.