At a cross-strait media summit in Beijing on May 10, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Yang (汪洋) “instructed” Taiwanese media to give more coverage to Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework.
Meanwhile, it has come to the media’s attention that China has for many years been using academic exchanges for its “united front” operations, by which it seeks to influence Taiwanese to favor unification.
These reports are just the tip of the iceberg, and the issues involved are not new.
Last year, Taiwan’s national security agencies found solid evidence that China has been using “troll factories” to cultivate “self-media” that “attack” Taiwan with fake news. A wide range of Chinese institutions, including the People’s Liberation Army, propaganda departments and Taiwan-related agencies, have “Internet armies” that set up accounts on social media such as microblogging sites, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to launch “cognitive space combat” operations against Taiwan.
As well as launching cyberattacks, they use an endless stream of misinformation to attack Taiwan’s government and subject Taiwanese to a broad range of “united front” work.
“Cognitive space,” also called the “cognitive domain,” is a term used in the psychology of advertising. US think tank Rand Corp describes “cognitive space combat” as having a number of features, including mass production of information; multiple channels of dissemination; rapid and sustained repetition; meticulously realistic presentation; and repeated changes and confusion.
China calls it the “cognitive domain,” which it defines as the conscious domain of combatants in “information-based warfare.”
China considers this to be an intangible military category that consists of perception, understanding, beliefs and values, and it is generally expressed in combatants’ personalities and abilities, armies’ cohesion, combat experience, level of training, battlefield situation awareness, public opinion and so on.
China does not only apply this strategy to Taiwan. For example, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has issued warnings about two methods used by China, namely phishing Web sites that it has set up to dishonestly obtain secret and sensitive data and its “Internet army,” which is used to influence public opinion.
China’s “cognitive space combat” against Taiwan is a continuation of its past “united front” work, which consists of penetrating Taiwan down to the level of ordinary people’s homes, hearts and minds.
What it is doing now is combining modern technology with its various long-standing psychological warfare stratagems and propaganda methods. Although these methods are not new, the main and most worrying point is that this “boiling frogs” style of “united front” work makes it hard for ordinary people to notice what is happening and guard against it.
Taiwan must examine whether it has taken all precautions against China’s “united front” strategy, and should consider how to make Taiwanese sufficiently aware of who the enemy is and what it is doing.
Taiwan needs to examine and strengthen work in the fields of legislation, education and public information.
Everyone should thoroughly understand the enemy’s intentions and tricks, and the government should model its legal framework on those of countries such as the US, the UK and Germany.
Only that will suffice to safeguard the security of the nation and its people by preventing Chinese forces from controlling public opinion, infiltrating civic society and sowing division.
Chang Ling-ling is a political instructor at National Defense University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The global chip shortage last year caused an unprecedented supply-chain crisis, affecting many key industries, including the auto industry. Europe, Japan and the US began to realize the indispensability and ubiquitous dominance of Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry. At the same time, amid the US-China trade war, Beijing’s military aggressions against Taiwan became increasingly blatant and provocative. In light of these developments, Europe, Japan and the US are formulating new policies to rebuild their domestic semiconductor manufacturing base, so as to mitigate the enormous geopolitical and economic risks involved. Last year, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) commanded 56 percent of the global
Anniversaries can serve multiple functions. For example when Taiwan commemorates the 228 Incident, there is a combined feeling of sadness over the sufferings following the events in 1947, joined with the resolve that such a tragedy should never be allowed to happen again. This year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) attended the 25th anniversary of the UK’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a different and strange mood prevailed. Even stranger yet was Xi’s explanatory narrative. Those who had attended the historic event in 1997 could recall how festive it had been. Media were
When I was teaching in Lesotho in southern Africa during the 1980s, I taught a class on comparative foreign policy. The course included trips to the US embassy, the Soviet embassy, the British embassy and the newly established Chinese embassy. The students could ask the ambassadors and staff questions about foreign policy, and would then write a report as their final term paper. The Chinese ambassador felt that the US-style education I delivered was unique and invited me to go to China to teach. At the time, China was planning to open up to the world, and it needed professors versed
As the geopolitical effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine become more obvious, the collective defense provided by NATO is the key security umbrella that unites European countries and protects them from further intrusion by their malicious eastern neighbor. With Finland and Sweden having been invited to join NATO — which, if they join, would increase the number of member states from 30 to 32 — two more nations in the region are in line to be included in the regional security pact. Meanwhile, the support that Russia has been receiving behind the scenes from China and other countries is one of the
RSS