Analysts say China is ramping up its efforts to interfere in Taiwan’s coming presidential and legislative elections, launching high-level, coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media and sponsoring Taiwanese politicians on trips to China, hoping to sway public opinion through influential local leaders.
Analysts say Beijing’s goal is to help the main opposition party, the China-friendly Kuomintang or KMT, win the election.
“Beijing will do whatever they can to help the KMT win, but I think they still don’t know how to do that well,” Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, told VOA in a recent interview.
Taiwanese intelligence authorities said last week that senior Chinese officials from various government agencies, including China’s defense ministry and Taiwan Affairs Office, held a meeting earlier this month to “coordinate” Beijing’s efforts to influence the January 13 elections.
The meeting, led by China’s fourth-ranked official, Wang Huning, reportedly assigned different tasks to several government agencies, with the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party and a psychological warfare unit under the People’s Liberation Army leading influence campaigns to sway public opinion. The Taiwan Affairs Office and the United Front Work Department focus on facilitating outreach programs, according to an internal Taiwanese memo shared with Reuters.
Rorry Daniels, managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the meeting was designed to organize the Chinese Communist Party’s internal efforts to influence Taiwanese voters’ choices.
“They want to make sure that their internal policy organs are coordinated on what each of them wants to do to change the conversation inside Taiwan with regard to influencing voter choices,” Daniels told VOA in a phone interview.
TikTok and YouTube
The main tool of influence involves disinformation campaigns on YouTube and TikTok designed to amplify pro-Beijing narratives while creating divisions in Taiwanese society.
“The main aim is to exacerbate certain narratives that are advantageous to Beijing, to weaken its partners’ opponents in Taiwan, to sow divisions and confuse the public,” J. Michael Cole, senior adviser on Countering Foreign Authoritarian Influence with the International Republican Institute in Taiwan, told VOA.
Chiu Tai-San, the minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, urged Beijing to “act as a responsible power and stop intimidating and coercing Taiwan.” He said doing so could help to gradually eliminate the “hostile spiral” between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Mainland Affairs Council oversees cross-strait relations.
The Chinese Embassy in the United States told VOA in a written response that Beijing respects the current social system in Taiwan and hopes the results of the election will “help maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait” and bring cross-strait relations back to the “right track of peaceful development.”
Beijing has also sponsored hundreds of Taiwanese politicians on trips to China over the last month. Taiwan’s interior minister, Lin Yu-chang, said on Monday that at least 556 borough chiefs or village leaders in Taiwan have participated in 51 group trips to China.
Last week, Taiwanese prosecutors launched an investigation into five people for allegedly arranging free trips to China for dozens of voters. According to them, one man surnamed Chou offered “unfair benefits” such as free meals and accommodation to 60 people who took part in the trip and asked these individuals to support candidates from specific political parties.
Cole in Taipei said the effectiveness of Beijing’s attempt to influence Taiwanese elections through sponsored trips remains questionable. “Certainly, a small number of individuals might agree to be co-opted and ‘return the favor’ by doing something that furthers Beijing’s interests,” he told VOA. “However, most Taiwanese are clear-eyed when it comes to these favors.”
In his view, success through these efforts is “too limited” to overthrow trends in Taiwanese attitudes toward China.
"Cognitive warfare"
However, some Taiwanese experts warn that China’s efforts to discredit the ruling Democratic Progressive Party or DPP could pose serious challenges to the Taiwanese authorities in the run-up to the election.
“The target of Beijing’s cognitive warfare has long been swing voters and doubling down on narratives related to the potential conflict across the Taiwan Strait is an effective strategy to sway swing voters,” Puma Shen, chairperson of Taipei-based research group Doublethink Lab, told VOA by phone.
In addition to amplifying fears that a victory by DPP’s presidential candidate, Lai Ching-te, could heighten the risk of war across the Taiwan Strait, Shen said Beijing is also spreading disinformation. He cited as falsehoods word that Taiwan’s public safety is deteriorating and that the Taiwanese government is wasting money on maintaining diplomatic allies while people are struggling economically.
In his view, these efforts could increase swing voters’ political apathy and eventually lead to their disengagement from politics.
“While Beijing focuses on discrediting Taiwan’s ruling party through a range of narratives, the Taiwanese government could only react to these false narratives and issue corresponding clarifications,” Shen said.
Whatever China tries to do, Templeman from Stanford University thinks the impact on the elections will be limited.
“I don’t expect [these efforts] to fundamentally reshape the election,” he told VOA. “The trends in Taiwan are too strong for Beijing to just weigh in at the margins and affect the outcome.”
