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
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics