On Friday, representatives from several Taiwanese media organizations attended a cross-strait media summit in Beijing cohosted by China’s Beijing Daily Group and the Taiwan-based Want Want China Times Media Group. At the closed-door Cross-Strait Media People Summit — also attended by Taiwan’s United Daily News Group, Eastern Broadcasting Co and TVBS Media — Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Yang (汪洋) called on Taiwanese media to promote a Taiwanese version of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model of governance, advocated by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in a speech on Jan. 2.
Participation at the event by Taiwanese media organizations — the contents of Wang’s address was subsequently leaked to the wider Taiwanese media — is disturbing and should be viewed through the prism of Beijing’s wider effort to influence public debate in Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls this its “united front” strategy — a decades-long “whole of society” campaign to infiltrate and subvert Taiwan’s open and liberal democracy, thereby achieving its goal of unification without the need to fire a single shot. The question is: What should the government do about it?
Predictably, the government has already issued several boilerplate statements criticizing the forum. On Saturday, the Mainland Affairs Council censured Wang for “using a cross-strait media summit as a platform for political propaganda.” President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has also weighed in, rebuking the CCP for interfering in Taiwan’s internal affairs and the freedom of its press.
Tellingly, both statements refrained from directly criticizing the Taiwanese media organizations in attendance, instead focusing on the forum itself. This might be because officials believe that at least some of the organizations attended in good faith, but were ambushed by Wang’s speech. Officials might also be wary of attacking individual media organizations, lest they are accused of encroaching upon freedom of the press.
However, there are signs that the government is moving toward tighter regulation of the media. Last month, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said: “We hope the media can regulate itself, but we have witnessed disconcerting developments, which the public has also condemned... Both self-regulation and laws are needed for effective regulation.”
The Executive Yuan is drafting a bill aimed at regulating false reporting in the media, while National Security Bureau (NSB) Deputy Director-General Ko Cheng-heng (柯承亨) yesterday told reporters his organization is keeping a close eye on domestic media that are either pro-China or share the CCP’s values and are spreading disinformation to influence public debate.
The government is also looking at amending the Criminal Code to allow for the prosecution of individuals who help spread false information. This highlights a significant conundrum for the government: Beijing’s “united front” campaign does not limit itself to traditional media. China is also using Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms, through which much of the younger generation obtains news reporting, to influence public debate by spreading disinformation and fake news.
Nevertheless, the trend toward online media also presents the government with an opportunity. Beijing’s social media influence campaign, to a large extent, rests upon it being able to fund pro-China content creators in Taiwan. It should be possible for the NSB to track and cut off funding sources linked to China.
However, the government must tread carefully. If it goes down the road of overt media censorship, it will begin to undo all of the progress made through Taiwan’s democratic reforms and will be unwittingly assisting Beijing in its goal of unification by destroying the very freedoms that differentiate liberal Taiwan from totalitarian China.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs