According to a news article in a local Chinese-language newspaper yesterday, National Security Council Secretariat Director Lieutenant-General James Liu (劉湘濱) claims in a book about Taiwan's security strategies that the Chinese government has laun-ched a new kind of information war on Taiwan.
This war involves sending special operations personnel to the country to establish a network of secret cells aimed at gauging and influencing public opinion.
participation
According to the report, these secret operatives are posing as members of the general public and are actively expressing their opinions by participating in TV and radio call-in shows, by calling and sending e-mails to different political debate programs on TV and radio, by sending thousands of e-mails to locally elected officials, and by actively participating in and manipulating local opinion polls, all with the aim of misleading local residents.
The members of the network, who avoid illegal activities and maintain contact via the Internet and through secret signals, are difficult to detect, and their aim is to influence public opinion prior to an electronic-warfare attack.
According to Liu, another task for the network is to provide support when troops are sent for a military attack by instigating the local population to demand that the government stop fighting as soon as possible, and to suppress local hatred for the enemy and the will to resist, thereby forcing the government to capitulate.
According to the report, it is estimated that these cells already consist of several hundred people, but they are rarely discovered by government authorities or local residents.
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