“The issue of Taiwan is for the Chinese to solve, and for the Chinese to make decisions on.”~ Premier Xi Jinping at the 20th National Congress in 2022 (Chen & Hetherington, 2022)
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, or Taiwan) came into existence during the same time period, and with similar contexts. The island state, having seen Chinese, Japanese and Dutch colonisation, fell into the control of the Kuomintang Party (KMT) after their loss to the Mao Zedong-led CCP.
Since their inception, the ROC and PRC both saw themselves as legitimate representatives of the Chinese population on the mainland and on the island state. Over time, these tensions evolved into reduced hostilities and diplomatic talks, including the 1992 Consensus. However, the rise of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan has led to increased anti-China narratives in Taiwan (Maizland, 2024). The erstwhile President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen’s explicit rejection of Chinese claims, coinciding with the pursuance of the “Wolf-Warrior” diplomacy by Premier Jinping, fuelled Chinese hostility across the strait, leading to strained diplomatic and trade ties (ibid).
The PRC is attempting to regulate Taiwan’s politics within this context. An important method for that task has been the use of “sharp power”. Sharp power involves tactics like censorship and manipulation aimed at undermining the independence of institutions, thereby restricting free expression and distorting the political landscape (Walker, 2018). China, growing notorious for media repression, exercises its sharp power through influence operations to push Chinese propaganda through democratic media systems.
This essay explores the Chinese propaganda spread across Taiwanese media, as well as the Taiwanese reaction and retaliation. To envision this, I will be using recent examples, especially the Taiwanese elections in January 2024. Finally, the reflective section covers an Indian perspective on Chinese influence operations, and how we must consider Taiwan as an important precedent to fortify our democratic media institutions from Chinese misuse.
Chinese Propaganda in Taiwan
In Taiwan, the KMT leaders are in favour of maintaining the status quo and continue building on Taiwanese success, with DPP leaders arguing in favour of immediate independence. Taiwanese voters are vehemently opposed to outright reunification or the “one country, two systems” model after the institutional atrocities in Hong Kong (Maizland, 2024).
Therefore, the mainland propaganda aims to influence the Taiwanese citizens towards voting for KMT leaders, who seem to sympathise towards a united Chinese front, and developing a positive outlook towards Chinese reunification. These objectives are common to all aspects of Chinese manipulations in Taiwan, be it through social media or traditional media.
Modus Operandi of Influence Operations
We must define Chinese influence operations in Taiwan before discussing their methodology and methods. A key component of the 2003 Three Warfare Strategy, Chinese media warfare manipulates narratives in democratic systems with open communication infrastructures (Bhattacharya, 2024).
The Chinese media propaganda operates under the leadership of the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), and the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), dedicated towards propaganda aimed towards Taiwan (Charon & Vilmer, 2021). Chinese modus operandi for these influence operations has evolved over time, growing from state-operated foreign media to directly engaging with social media (Sharma, 2024). These operations involve aiding foreign academics and think-tanks (Bhattacharya, 2024), using indigenous social media sites like TikTok, and flooding X and YouTube with generative artificial intelligence (Sharma, 2024).
Manifestations of Chinese Influence
Chinese operations in Taiwanese have three core manifestations: traditional and television media, social media and cyber-attacks. The three follow the common modus operandi of international Chinese influence operations, but with specific contexts.
First, traditional and television media is corrupted through economic dependence and investments into the leading channels in Taiwan. The strategies employed by Beijing to compel Taiwanese media to practice self-censorship include embedded advertisements, acquiring television show copyrights, persuading pro-Beijing entrepreneurs to purchase Taiwanese media enterprises, and exerting pressure on Taiwanese journalists and media proprietors (Jaw-Nian, 2017).
Furthermore, the strategic move of establishing strong trading ties between Taiwan and China in the 2000s has led to economic dependence on China, thus manipulating Taiwanese politics. This is especially relevant to traditional media, since the introduction of Chinese stakeholders and private players into the Taiwanese market has led to media houses becoming commercially tied to Chinese capital (Jaw-Nian, 2017).
The best example for this is the case of WantWant Holdings, a Taiwanese multinational that owns the pro-Beijing China Times newspaper and the TV stations China Television and Chung T’ien Television (CiTV). In 2019, investigations into the corporation proved strong ties with the UFWD, TAO and the CCP, and were receiving aid from them. Within a year, CiTV lost its broadcasting license, thus proving the claims of the investigation (Hale, 2023).
Social media is mired by generative AI, especially in Taiwan. Leading social media websites like Line, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and YouTube, have noticed a new Chinese tactic, titled ‘spamouflage’. Using bot accounts, Chinese stakeholders use a network of these media channels to flood social media with pro-Chinese posts or rumors. Generative AI is helpful in creating quick and high-quality posts, thus making it impossible to regulate (Iyengar, 2024).
An important case study for this was the usage of deepfake and generative AI technology during the 2024 Taiwanese elections. Deepfake videos and audios of important figures in Taiwan, such as Terry Gou and Lai Ching-te, were spread across Taiwanese social media on election day (Sharma, 2024). Even before that, an e-book containing rumors about sexual promiscuity of the then-President of the island state, circulated across social media and went viral when thousands of short-form videos flooded Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The videos were proven to be generated with the book serving as a script for these ‘spamouflage’ accounts to follow (Iyengar, 2024).
Finally, Chinese-led cyber-attacks are common on Taiwanese institutions, but as separate undertakings. Recently, cyber-attacks become an integral part of Chinese influence operations in Taiwan. Research indicates that cyber-attacks increased in frequency and severity just a few days before elections. Although Taiwanese elections follow a manual election, thus protecting election infrastructure from cyber-attacks and manipulation, these cyber-attacks were a part of a strategy to collect damaging information against political leaders and institutions for future media manipulation. This tactic, derived from Soviet-era operations, is termed as “mo hei” in Mandarin, and is a key feature of mainland influence operations on Taiwan (An, 2024).
Taiwanese Counter-Narrative Efforts
On-Ground Impact of Chinese Attempts to Manipulate Media
To understand Taiwanese counter-narrative efforts, we must first consider Chinese influence. Mainland media influence can affect voter or citizen mindsets or press freedoms directly. We will examine both facets in this section.
Huang Jaw-Nian (2017) uses this graph to argue that the aforementioned Chinese methods of media subjugation are transformative in Taiwan. He identifies Want Want‑China Times Media Group, UDN, FTV, and SET, among other Taiwanese media companies, which self-censor anti-China news and narratives due to their commercial ties with the mainland. Thus, he proves that traditional and television media in Taiwan is corrupted by inappropriate but legal intervention made by state-backed Chinese organisations (Jaw-Nian, 2017).
Public perception, although the key objective of Chinese influence operations, has remained independent and unbiased. Chinese media involvements since 2019 have revolved around increasing support for closer ties with the mainland, and voting the incumbent DPP out of office. Both these goals have remained unfulfilled.
Qualitative research conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) proved a reducing appetite for pro-China narratives in Taiwan. As the following graph shows, 61% of Taiwanese adults held unfavourable views about the mainland, both economically and politically. In fact, over 80% of the population leans towards strengthening relations with their American counterparts over the Chinese (Delvin & Huang, 2020).
Early in the pandemic, Chinese attitudes in Taiwan dropped to their lowest in the 21st century. Over 90% of Taiwanese opposed the “one country, two systems” model and CCP diplomatic oppression of Taiwan. The MAC study found that 91.6% of Taiwanese believed the CCP was damaging their health and safety by preventing WHO interactions. 70% supported President Ing-Wen’s demand for cross-strait dialogue during the pandemic to help Chinese surplus cases following Taiwanese epidemic prevention. Finally, 82.7% of Taiwanese backed the government’s plan to strengthen self-defence to protect national sovereignty and democracy (Mainland Affairs Council, 2020).
Finally, China’s ambition to affect the voting patterns have failed miserably. The election of the DPP into power for a record three times since 2016 proves the same. Tsai Ing-Wen won the Presidential elections with a landslide victory against the KMT competitors in 2016 and 2020, while Lai Ching-Te beat the incumbency effect and the KMT opposition to win the race in 2024, albeit not with an outright majority (Rigger, 2024).
Factors of Taiwanese Resistance
Different Taiwanese stakeholders perceive Chinese failures in different methods. The officials, experts and policymakers see these efforts as a means of ‘cognitive warfare’, thus looking towards policy interventions to strengthen the ‘cognitive framework’ of the Taiwanese people. On the other hand, researchers and public stakeholders have attributed high literacy rates and Taiwan’s pluralistic and democratic society as strong ‘antibodies against Beijing’s meddling’ (Hass, 2022). Ko Shu-ling (2023) identifies four factors aiding the Taiwanese resistance to Chinese influence operations.
Firstly, Taiwanese media consumers have grown more patriotic by the generation, thus building a resistance and distaste against Chinese disinformation. As more young people identify as Taiwanese, more citizens disregard these sources of misinformation.
From the government’s perspective, the creation of the Ministry of Digital Affairs in 2022 has been a significant factor competing with Chinese operations. The efforts of the ministry range from supporting private initiatives to running media literacy programs to utilising social media to directly engage the public with policymaking.
Identifying social influencers vulnerable to PRC recruitment and monitoring their activities is an important undertaking of the Taiwanese government. Although their ability to act upon this information is restricted by the democratic freedom of speech, it has proven to be successful against elite corruption by the PRC.
Civil society organisations and private institutions take the question of countering mainland misinformation as their responsibility. Thus, the last factor of Taiwanese resistance comes from fact-checking and information literacy campaigns. The Taiwan Fact Check Center and Cofacts lead the fact-checking industry, identifying misinformation and AI in social and mainstream media. Lastly, private organisations like the Fake News Cleaner identify elderly citizens as most susceptible to misinformation campaigns and thus, provide information literacy programs catering to them (Shu-ling, 2023).
Conclusion: Implications for Global Information Warfare
From an Indian perspective, the case of Taiwan is especially relevant in the modern era of increasing tensions with China over border issues. In an ethnically-divided state with low literacy rates, Chinese influence operations could derail democratic characteristics of the country.
In India, Chinese influence operations have been unable to effectively enter the social media space due to the immediate ban of Chinese social media websites and crackdown on the unregulated freedoms of the social media websites in the state (Sharma, 2024). However, concerns about commercial influence over journalists and mainstream newspapers remain, as do threats of cyber-attacks on weak Indian information infrastructure. Former Election Commissioner Anup Chandra expressed his fear about Chinese influence operations threatening election infrastructure and integrity, thus proving the severity of the threat we face (Sharma, 2024).
Therefore, it should be our prerogative to learn from the Taiwanese and build a strong regulatory and civil society network to protect media infrastructures in a democratic manner. Building information literacy is key to build an informed electorate. Therefore, further cooperation with like-minded democratic states and promoting public-private partnership in enhancing election infrastructure is key to India’s resistance to Chinese ‘cognitive warfare’. In conclusion, although the Taiwan-China cross-strait sovereignty issue may take years to resolve, it is clear that Chinese misinformation campaigns and influence operations will not evolve into substitutes for Taiwanese democracy.
