China has developed a network-mapping project targeting political figures and parties in Taiwan to monitor public opinion during elections and to craft tailored influence campaigns aimed at dividing Taiwanese society, according to documents leaked by Chinese technology firm GoLaxy (中科天璣).
The documents, collected by Taipei-based Doublethink Lab, showed a database was specifically created to gather detailed information on Taiwanese political figures, including their political affiliations, job histories, birthplaces, residences, education, religion and a brief biography about them.
Several notable Taiwanese politicians are in the database, including President William Lai (賴清德), former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), Minister Without Portfolio Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁).
Photo: screen grab from GoLaxy documents
It also includes records of tens of thousands of Taiwanese prominent in religion, academia and business.
The Beijing-based data firm also created a Taiwan-related knowledge graph about Taiwanese political parties, both large and small.
Aside from a political party’s date of establishment, founders, current leaders, estimated number of members, contact information and attitude toward China, the graph also supports inquiries by connecting party leaders, their offices and geographical coordinates. The function allows its users to find the “pan-green” politicians organizing anti-China campaigns in specific localities and identify “pan-blue” politicians controlling key choke points of the Taiwanese political system.
The structured dataset further enables users to conduct virtual-real mapping with more than 6.2 million news articles and social media posts, at least 10,000 Taiwan-related sources worldwide, and about 5,000 key social media accounts identified as targets, the GoLaxy papers showed.
Overall, the database contains 170 detailed files of Taiwanese politicians, about 23 million records of Taiwan household registration data from closed sources, as well as information about 75 Taiwanese political parties, 1,478 Taiwanese firms, 13,000 Taiwanese religious groups and nearly 24,000 Taiwanese civic organizations.
Meanwhile, the leaked papers showed a Taiwan Online Public Opinion Weekly Report, which was published at the end of 2023 before the 2024 presidential and legislative elections. The report said it had tracked 634,448 records of online content posted between Nov. 25 and Dec. 1, 2023, including original posts and responses to those posts.
The report also tracked and analyzed the competing narratives among the presidential candidates of the Democratic Progressive Party, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan’s People Party (TPP), the papers showed.
It identified moments when there was a sudden rise of media exposure for Ko, the then-TPP presidential candidate, and then-KMT presidential and vice presidential candidates Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and Jaw Shaw-kang (趙少康), while assessing how the DPP was able to shape public opinion through issues such as the cross-strait service trade agreement.
The report also prioritized attacks against Jaw and former TPP legislator Cynthia Wu (吳欣盈), who at the time was Ko’s vice presidential candidate, their responses and evaluated how the interactions swayed voters.
GoLaxy said that the information of Taiwanese politicians was collected to support the narrative wars in Taiwan.
One of the projects was to collect at least 50,000 Taiwan-related news articles and put the people mentioned into “hardliner,” “friendly faction,” “swing group” and “objective group” categories.
Each category contained at least 1,000 key personnel, making it easier to associate with divisive campaigns.
Another project is to simulate the preferences, cognition and language styles of target audiences and create virtual characters speaking in Mandarin, Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and English to interact with them in scripted dialogues.
At least 100 virtual characters were created to interact with target audiences using text, photographs, audio files and videos in more than 10 virtual scenarios, the papers showed.
Separately, an investigation by Reporters Without Borders said that Beijing is seeking to export its model of media control by expanding the global reach of state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN) to push its narratives, spread biased reporting, shape international opinion and conceal its human rights abuses.
“CGTN effectively advances state narratives and serves as a mouthpiece for the [Chinese Communist] Party’s propaganda apparatus. Diktats include instructions on the vocabulary to use and the information to report when covering ‘sensitive’ subjects such as Tibet, repressions in the Uighur region, Taiwan or pro-democracy movements, often portraying the government in a positive light despite the constant criticism of its human rights abuses,” the reporters Without Borders report said.
“It also amplifies the narratives of allied authoritarian regimes, including Russia. One month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a CGTN social media account repeated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unsubstantiated accusation that ‘Ukrainian neo-nazis opened fire on Chinese students,’” it said.
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