A Beijing-based think tank last week published a poll showing that the majority of Chinese consider “international military intervention in Taiwan” one of the top threats facing China.
Arguably, the sole purpose of the poll, which was conducted by the Tsinghua University Center for International Security and Strategy, is to serve as propaganda. A poll conducted in China, where freedom of speech is curtailed, cannot accurately reflect public opinion. Chinese would be reluctant to publicly express their true opinion, especially when it contradicts the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) narrative, as doing so would likely be construed as subversive behavior.
RAND Corp Hu Taiwan Policy Initiative director Raymond Kuo (郭泓均) said as much. Commenting on a separate poll, he said that the number that expressed a dissenting view in that poll was likely only one-quarter of the true number.
Even if Chinese were to express themselves truthfully in a poll, the information would be of little use to policymakers in Beijing. Direct elections are held only at the local level in China, where nominees are controlled and vetted by the CCP. Hence, Chinese policymakers are not held accountable to the public.
While Beijing has been shown to take public opinion into account on rare occasions — for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic when successive lockdowns led to widespread protests, eventually prompting Beijing to ease restrictions — protests are dangerous and invariably lead to many arrests.
The poll might have been in part a response to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center in Washington, which for the past few years have shown that the majority of the US public holds a negative view of China. In 2020, the survey showed that about 74 percent of Americans felt China handled the pandemic poorly, while 55 percent said they had “no confidence at all” in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) handling of international affairs.
Tsinghua is a public university, and it is not unlikely that the CCP commissioned the poll in an attempt to convince the Chinese public that negative views of the US are the norm in China, just as negative views of China are prevalent in the US. This might have been done to fan the flames of nationalism, which the CCP has done in the past to deflect attention from restrictions on personal freedoms by portraying “foreign interference” as a more pressing threat that Chinese should rally against.
That the South China Morning Post also reported on the poll suggests that the CCP intends to use it as propaganda in Hong Kong. Hong Kong no longer enjoys press freedom, and it is not a stretch to assume that it was the CCP’s idea for the news outlet to run the report.
The report was subsequently picked up by Chinese-language media in Taiwan, giving the CCP a wider audience for its message that it is the US — rather than China — that is the real aggressor in the Indo-Pacific region, and that Beijing’s military buildup is for self-defense and not expansionism. China has probably taken cues from Russia, which has tried to paint its war of aggression against Ukraine as a self-defense measure intended to keep NATO at bay.
Taiwanese have freer access to information than Chinese do, but the government must still ensure that media literacy in Taiwan is kept high, as China has been ramping up its cognitive warfare.
The government should use information campaigns to improve public awareness of Chinese disinformation, and work with news and social media companies, with the assistance of artificial intelligence technology, to flag content identified as disinformation. Schools should also teach children about disinformation and other threats from China, and conduct audits to limit the impact of China-friendly educators.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
RSS