YouTuber Pa Chiung (八炯) posted a video on Friday last week about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bribes Taiwanese online influencers in its “united front” efforts to manipulate public opinion in Taiwan. The video showed how China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) provided Taiwanese rapper Chen Po-yuan (陳柏源) with the tools with which to create anti-Taiwanese independence content.
Whereas official propaganda works well within China to a domestic audience, international audiences, with their access to less controlled content, present a problem for the CCP, which wants to keep a tight rein on the narrative. However, the party has found a way to use free speech and an unregulated social media environment to its benefit: control the situation at source, influence the influencers and offer financial rewards for people wanting to monetize content on online platforms that exist beyond the Great Firewall of China.
To paraphrase the old saying: “If you can’t beat them, get them to join you.”
Chen’s situation is far from an isolated case. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has released reports on the subject: “Frontier influencers: the new face of China’s propaganda” in 2022 and “Singing from the CCP’s songsheet: The role of foreign influencers in China’s propaganda system” last year. It lists online influencers suspected of taking financial inducements from the UFWD to produce content to influence international audiences about how wonderful the CCP regime is and how it compares favorably to Western governments.
In January, Chinese newspaper the Global Times pushed back against the findings in the second report, saying that the ASPI was funded by the US and was peddling anti-China propaganda, in what it called a “thief crying ‘stop thief’” tactic.
That accusation, made within a denial that the CCP was engaged in propaganda peddling, was a case of distracting from the accusation of disinformation with yet more disinformation. That is, the Global Times was playing a thief crying “stop thief” to distract attention from a third thief mounted on an elephant sitting in the room.
That elephant is the fact that this behavior goes way beyond YouTube influencers: It extends to international academics and influential businesspeople.
A renowned US individual has excoriated US foreign policy on Taiwan while openly praising the CCP’s achievements, conveniently ignoring Beijing’s aggressive posture in the region or the wishes of 23 million Taiwanese. In September last year, Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk said that Taiwan is “an integral part of China,” that the US’ military strength in the western Pacific would eventually be weaker than China’s, and that Taiwan should talk to China about becoming a “special administrative zone.”
All of these points sound suspiciously like they could have been drafted by the UFWD with international audiences in mind.
The CCP is not the only political entity guilty of mendacity or the peddling of partial truths to form an intended narrative. These are, of course, the stuff of which politics and discourse are made. Truth does exist, but rarely in its purest form, and everyone has their own agenda, media outlets included. With so many potential thieves crying “stop thief” in the media environment, one could legitimately ask whether any information can be trusted.
However, this is about so much more than winning the argument in the abstract; it is about Taiwan’s sovereignty, so pushback is in order.
The most effective way to guard against this barrage of information is for audiences to be educated and informed about what is going on in the background and of the secret agendas behind what they hear and read, to understand the degree to which sources can reasonably be trusted, and to be suspicious of simplistic, one-sided narratives.
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