FEATURE/Fear of intervention by China reigns, but tracking it not always easy

By Alison Hsiao, CNA staff reporter

As another election season arrives, with Taiwan set to elect a new president on Jan. 13, 2024, talk of Chinese interference in Taiwan and the use of disinformation to influence Taiwanese voters has resurfaced and stoked debate on how prevalent and effective these operations are.

Some examples of China trying to influence Taiwan leading up to the election have been out in the open, including Beijing announcing a tax and land audit of Foxconn in China, seen by some as an attempt to dissuade Foxconn founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) from continuing his run for Taiwan's presidency.

Gou, who is no longer involved in Foxconn's operations but remains a major shareholder, later dropped his candidacy, but whether he did it because of Chinese pressure or because of poll numbers showing him with single-digit support is a matter of speculation.

There have also been local media reports of Taiwanese political talk show hosts and pollsters being invited to and visiting China in September or a political aide's unannounced visit to Beijing before his boss made a major political move in mid-November.

Harder to define and identify, however, are the less obvious tools used by Beijing to intervene in and influence not just elections but Taiwanese society on a daily basis.

"They [Beijing] do things in an opaque matter to make it hard for us to see it," Nathan F. Batto, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica, said by videoconference at a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

"[That] makes it very hard to collect data on it and to say in any kind of a really rigorous way [that] Beijing is definitely doing this, are definitely doing that, for this purpose, or that purpose."

CNA interviewed several experts on the subject, who agreed that pinning down Beijing on some of its influence operations aimed at influencing the ways of life of Taiwanese and swaying their views can be difficult.

They said, however, that there are indicators based on which people can perhaps recognize and assess China's moves.

'Transparency'

Transparency is one, they said, with certain red flags identifiable, especially in the realm of information.

"The crux of the matter is transparency," said Huang Jaw-nian (黃兆年), an associate professor with National Chengchi University's Graduate Institute of Development Studies, when asked to compare China's actions with the propaganda efforts of non-authoritarian countries inside and outside their countries.

"The Chinese government's official media has the mission of 'telling China's stories well,' which is perfectly fine as all governments do this as part of their country's soft power," he said.

But there is another side to the story, he argued, citing the example of China Watch, a paid-for section sponsored by China Daily that is published by the Chinese Communist Party's Central Leading Group on Foreign Media.

China Daily paid millions of U.S. dollars to major media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to use the China Watch insert, though many newspapers around the world stopped running the insert in 2020.

Though China Watch content was accompanied by clear disclaimers that the content was paid for by China Daily, Huang and the China Media Project, an independent research project specializing in the study of the Chinese media landscape, argued it was still problematic.

"While these supplements are labeled as 'advertisements' by the host papers, it is left to...readers themselves to recognize them for what they are: state-sponsored propaganda," China Media Project said in a report.

Propaganda, in itself, may be a common tool of countries around the world, but there can be differences.

David Shullman, senior director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, an American think-tank, said during a speech in Taipei in October at a workshop on combating disinformation that he often got questions that he said bordered on "relativism" that "benefits countries like Russia and China."

"Don't we all...try to push our perspective, with countries using public diplomacy and messaging to advance their interests...? Is this not simply the marketplace of ideas and information, and may the best message win?" is how he framed the question.

The answer, Shullman contended, is that "China is different." It is run by the Chinese Communist Party that hews closely to Leninism, a political doctrine that dictates the communist party's "control over the system but also over information and even ideas."

He said China uses its authoritarian power to forge a single voice internally and is now applying "the same tactics...to ensure the party's voice is heard above all others beyond its borders."

Yu Chih-hao (游知澔), co-director of the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), was even more blunt.

"A straightforward difference is that China aims to annex Taiwan and derail our way of life and democracy. Of all the psychological and cognitive warfares in the world, China's is a matter of life and death to the Taiwanese people," he argued in an interview with CNA.

Influence Operations: Veiled amplifier

How Taiwan confronts China's information manipulation has been the focus of Huang's research.

He categorizes China's information campaigns as "direct influences," referring to official media outlets disseminating messages by exploiting Taiwan's free internet and speech, or "indirect influences," which rely on financial and disinformation operations.

The direct influence of Chinese official outlets bashing Taiwan or the U.S. is observable, Huang said.

Identifying the indirect influence is the tricky part, but when the influence is gained through financial operations, it can be seen in terms of ownership and advertising, Huang said.

The most obvious example of China's influence in terms of media ownership in Taiwan is the Want Want Group, he said.

"Taiwan does not allow Chinese investment in our media, but Want Want China as a food company received Chinese subsidies in China and in turn injected funds into the Want Want China Times Media Group in Taiwan through the renting of offices and purchases of ads [from 2013 to 2020]," Huang said.

He said the subsidies the company received in China were doubled in 2009 after the group acquired Taiwanese media outlets at the end of 2008.

In the advertising realm, Huang mentioned "paid news" deals revealed by Reuters in 2019 based on interviews conducted with insiders, in which at least five Taiwan media groups were said to have been paid by the Chinese authorities "for coverage in various publications and on a television channel."

In terms of so-called disinformation operations, however, Huang acknowledged the difficulty of obtaining hard evidence of the sources of indirect influence.

Yu said it was difficult because IP addresses are often hard to track, and even if they can be, there is always the problem of IP bouncing.

Pinpointing financial exchanges or other kinds of evidence is also hard, if not impossible, between actors spreading certain narratives, he said.

There are, however, other ways to locate the connections, Yu argued.

"A narrative is a set of texts. We rely on data science to tell us how different texts -- published by different actors on different platforms and at different times -- relate to each other in terms of similarity in the use of terms and publishing/posting time sequences," Yu said.

"Together the related texts form a narrative," he said.

Most of the time, according to Yu, PRC actors controlled by PRC-party-state authorities, party-state media, or party-state-affiliated media organizations play the part of an amplifier rather than a creator.

Though most narratives arise within Taiwan, their amplification is a key component of Chinese operations, Yu said.

In the IORG's recent report on "U.S. skepticism narratives," Yu and the team located 84 narratives aiming to discredit U.S.-Taiwan relations, of which PRC actors were involved in the amplification of 70 of them.

The narratives were built around 12 key events, such as COVID-19 vaccines, arms sales, the visit by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August, 2022, and TSMC's building of factories in the United States.

Huang said PRC actors often amplify narratives that play on Taiwan's own mobilization of bias in political communication against it.

According to the IORG report, dubious narratives are created by Taiwanese within Taiwan because of "cracks" in society, and if disinformation from China is brokered along these existing ideological fault lines, it can spread easily, Huang said.

He pointed to the example of the 2018 Kansai International Airport incident, which was set off by claims that buses dispatched by China's consulate in Osaka had rescued Taiwanese travelers stranded at Kansai International Airport by a typhoon if they identified themselves as "Chinese."

The story, later found to have originated from a Chinese content farm, was instantly picked up by mainstream Taiwanese media of all stripes, with both pro-China and pro-independence camps having something to gain in reporting and amplifying it.

Pro-China outlets blamed the Taiwanese government for failing to help the tourists, and pro-independence media lashed out at China for taking advantage of the tourists' misery.

That China would take advantage of such fissures was not a surprise as playing on and amplifying existing social divisions to destabilize another country has been a tactic used by authoritarian regimes in the past, he said.

Both Huang and Yu said they believed there were regulatory mechanisms that can be set up to make information and social platforms more responsible.

They argued, however, that ultimately there needed to be public and private cooperation in providing correct information and enhancing media literacy that cautions people against not only incorrect or unsubstantiated information but also incomplete and sensational messages.

"What we need to do is to continue keeping people more informed and believe they are able to make good choices," Yu said. "There is simply no shortcut in a democratic society."

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