For a dictatorial regime, the Chinese Communist Party certainly enjoys playing with democracies. Obsessed with dragging Taiwan under its control, it hopes to skew next month’s January 13 elections toward candidates it considers malleable to this intention. Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, carefully planted fake news and trolling are among the tricks of its trade.
On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, this has taken the familiar form of scare tactics. However, Beijing’s standard threat of war if its self-appointed nemesis, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), is reelected for a third term has been reportedly augmented with the deliberate targeting of the younger voting demographic with the specter of conscription.
If accurate, this marks a savvy direction for the war-mongering line of China’s information tactics. The logic goes that a vote for the DPP is a vote for Taiwan independence, which makes war and conscription inevitable. Since young people do indeed shoulder a disproportionate burden of military duty and tend to use TikTok as an entertainment and news source, the message is potentially very powerful, especially given that the matter of whether conflict breaks out or not is entirely in Beijing’s hands.
Indeed, unlike most China-guided opinions, the threat is arguably more potent if people recognize where it originates. It is naturally accompanied by both real-world warplanes buzzing around Taiwan and digital content that hypes the prospect of imminent invasion from the People’s Liberation Army: misleading videos that splice together old footage of military activity, repackage it as new and then give it the veneer of legitimacy with quotes that are falsely attributed to Western news outlets.
Street interviews, whose algorithm-boosting comments have hallmarks of China’s propaganda machine, have been bolstering the message for some time, featuring people in Taipei’s youth-leaning Ximending area who talk about the supposed contradiction between seeking Taiwan independence and not wanting to declare war; the impossibility of winning against an entity as big as China; Chinese people not fighting fellow Chinese; and fears that the U.S. and Japan would not support Taiwan in the event of conflict.
The latter point feeds into an “American skepticism” narrative, which levers examples like the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and wavering on Ukraine to engender feelings that Taiwan would be abandoned internationally in the event of an attack. The storyboard draws in narratives that depict Washington as duplicitously selling Taipei substandard (or non-existent) weapons, transforming it into a literal minefield or two-facedly plundering it for tech knowhow. The idea is to alienate voters from West-facing politicians, and, although many concerns about the authenticity of U.S. intentions toward Taiwan are organic opinions based on objective world events, there is little doubt that Beijing is pushing them from the shadows.
On the other hand, China’s cognitive warfare, which aims to achieve acquiescence with its goals from Taiwan’s population by making people feel that “reunification” with the motherland cannot be avoided in any scenario, has certain weaknesses. If citizens become too convinced that the end is unchangeable, they may as well vote for whomever they please in the meantime.
Its other flaw is that the current race for Taipei’s Presidential Office Building is a three-way battle, not a two-way one, which differs from elections past. China would like to see a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) victory, and, whereas in previous years bashing the DPP would hopefully switch at least some voters to the KMT as the only viable alternative, this time Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), a relative newcomer, is certain to pick up quite a chunk of votes.
While Beijing would rather see a strong TPP showing than a DPP one, which could lay the conditions for a “lame duck” presidency for the latter, Ko is unpredictable. He has flirted with both main parties during his political career, and the failed attempt to create a joint KMT-TPP ticket for the present election race has already sunk China’s most realistic hope of strengthening its influence over Taiwan’s future. Moreover, Ko has more popularity among Gen Z, so doomscroll propaganda aimed at eroding DPP popularity on TikTok may shepherd people towards his party.
As per Taiwan AI Labs, a privately funded institution with a specialism for researching misinformation, at least one online troll group has been looking to head off this possibility by turning fire on the TPP in the aftermath of the collapse of the KMT alliance. Others, however, have strengthened their support of Ko, perhaps as an insurance policy for middle-ground voters, some of whom might not be able to reconcile themselves to supporting the pure-blue of the Chinese nationalists without the TPP for ballast. From a Beijing perspective, it is important to make sure that such people do not opt for the DPP under any circumstances.
Accordingly, it is the DPP and its current president, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who, by AI Labs measure, generally attract the most attention from coordinated internet attack squads, especially on Facebook. Supplementing war panic and the aforementioned American skepticism in the comments sections are fake news items that conjure doubt about competence and integrity of the party and its rulership.
These often seem to take the form of older misinformation seeded in previous years that is brought to prominence again near election time. Recent examples assessed as common by the Taiwan Factcheck Center have included the resurfacing of an inaccurate story from the last election that the current government plans to spend $1.6 billion on reissuing the New Taiwan dollar so as to accord with badly designed law and an equally false rumor that, under the DPP, the Ministry of Education has leaned on the famous Chien Kuo High School to remove a plaque displaying the four cardinal principles of Confucianism.
The latter presumably looks to paint the current ruling administration as anti-tradition and fuel perceptions that a policy of desinicization is progressing under its watch, a controversy that would entrench opinions that support the KMT. However, together with sensationalist fake news tidbits such as a recent tale that the mausoleum of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek was being torn down, such narratives also aim to present the DPP as edging towards dictatorial rule itself.
Indeed, even as Taiwan is consistently ranked as one of the freest countries in the world, murkily sourced claims are floating around the internet alleging that the incumbent party is wiretapping thousands of its citizens. Meanwhile, Beijing is throwing up new challenges for democracy by wining and dining hundreds of local-level Taiwanese politicians on the run-up to the 2024 election, potentially grooming them for influence campaigns and encouraging them to throw their weight behind candidates that will further China’s policies.
Taiwan has laws that criminalize the receipt of funds for election campaigns from hostile external forces, and investigations are underway into such trips, including the detention of a Chinese national. An online journalist surnamed Lin has also been arrested this month for allegedly publishing falsified opinion polls that favor the KMT on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party’s committee for the province of Fujian.
However, these cases and their timing highlight the very fine line that Taiwan must walk to safeguard the integrity of its electoral processes in the midst of an information war. Proving criminal misdeed is not a simple matter, especially where hospitality gifts are concerned, and unless wrongdoing is exceptionally well-evidenced, a new wellspring for yet more propaganda can easily be created for now and the future.
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