Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) won the mayoral election on Nov. 24 last year with the help of “a campaign of social media manipulation orchestrated by a mysterious, seemingly professional cybergroup from China,” Foreign Policy magazine said in an article published on Wednesday.
In the article, titled “Chinese cyber-operatives boosted Taiwan’s insurgent candidate,” Paul Huang (黃翔暐), a Taipei-based freelance journalist and writer and Kaohsiung native, wrote: “Barely six months into office, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu is already eyeing a run for the presidency in 2020 and is seen as the godsend that Beijing has been waiting for: the emergence of a populist, pro-China candidate in Taiwan.”
Despite “strong suspicions of Chinese interference” in the local elections held on Nov. 24 last year and a decline in President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) popularity, “few expected the DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] would lose Kaohsiung,” he wrote.
Photo: Hung Ting-hung, Taipei Times
In contrast to the DPP’s Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), “an experienced, if somewhat bland, legislator,” Han was “an outsider to Kaohsiung politics whose pro-China rhetoric seemed out of touch with the city’s fierce pro-independent ethos,” he wrote.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “only nominated him because it was considered a long-shot race,” he wrote, citing a KMT member with knowledge of the matter.
“At a glance, it would appear as if a populist candidate, riding on an incumbent president’s unpopularity, defied unfavorable electoral odds through his charisma and the sheer power of social media. That’s not an uncommon story. But that’s not the whole of the tale here,” he wrote.
At the end of the election campaign, Han’s Facebook account had accumulated 500,000 followers, twice that of Chen’s, while an unofficial Facebook group called “Han Kuo-yu Fans For Victory! Holding up a Blue Sky!” created on April 10 last year had more than 61,000 members by election day, he wrote.
Members of the unofficial group “promoted Han through posting talking points, memes, and very often fake news attacking Han’s opponent Chen, the DPP government, and anyone who said a bad word about Han,” he wrote.
Of the six administrators listed on the group page in November last year, Huang said he had identified three corresponding profiles on LinkedIn.
All three profiles claimed to be Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) employees and Peking University alumni, he wrote.
Two of the LinkedIn profiles wrote in their descriptions the phrase “worked in public relations for many foreign companies,” he wrote.
A LinkedIn search for this phrase gave 249 more results, “every single one sharing identical characteristics, including mugshot-style photos cropped from decades-old graduation pictures and claims of being Tencent employees and Peking University graduates,” he wrote, adding that the profiles have “some telltale signs of being fakes.”
National Chung Cheng University assistant professor Lin Ying-yu (林穎佑) “believes the cybergroup can be traced back to the Strategic Support Force of China’s army,” he wrote.
However, a Political Warfare Bureau psychological operations officer who declined to be named says the group was “likely a private team contracted through a Chinese company rather than being a dedicated military or intelligence unit in itself — albeit with the Chinese government ultimately pulling the strings,” he writes.
Lin and other experts “say there were many other groups, pages, content farms, and platforms out there beyond Facebook that Beijing used to propel Han to electoral success,” he wrote.
Huang wrote that while there is “no evidence Han himself colluded with this group or any other,” he was “certainly aware that his support online was somewhat mysterious.”
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique