China might be using a suspected leak of personal information from the Eslite bookstore chain to wage cognitive warfare against Taiwanese, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party said yesterday.
Cynthia Yang (楊欣慈), deputy secretary-general of the Here I Stand Project, told a news conference in Taipei that she received a telephone call on Saturday night from a woman who said she worked at Eslite’s marketing department.
The woman asked Yang if she wanted to participate in an opinion survey the company is conducting among its customers.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
She also said that the book If China Attacks (阿共打來怎麼辦), which Yang bought from Eslite’s online site in February, contains “inappropriate” content.
Yang agreed to participate in the survey and prepared to record the conversation.
A man, who also identified himself as Eslite staff, but seemed to have an accent unlike Taiwanese, called 10 minutes later to conduct the survey, Yang said.
The man had no intention of concealing his position and said “the Chinese military’s capabilities are strong, so there is no way Taiwan can win a war,” Yang said.
He repeatedly said that “the US will not help,” “Taiwanese soldiers are afraid to fight,” “the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] is better” and “unification with Taiwan is inevitable,” she said.
The man also did not know that Taichung is a city in Taiwan, she added.
Yang said she told him that “people who bought the book will not be brainwashed by you.”
“This was not a scam call, but a call to wage cognitive warfare,” she told the news conference.
She asked how the callers knew what book she had purchased and demanded an explanation from Eslite.
Taiwan Statebuilding Party secretary-general Wang Hsing-huan (王興煥) said the personal information of Eslite customers might have been leaked and used by China to conduct cognitive warfare against Taiwan.
Information security is a national security issue, so the Ministry of Digital Affairs should shoulder the responsibility for this incident, he said.
China is using telephone polls to spread conspiracies and rumors, such as that the military is not strong enough to repel a Chinese attack, and that the KMT would bring peace while the Democratic Progressive Party would bring conflict, he said.
The government should take the issue seriously, as China is targeting specific Taiwanese with these calls, he said.
Wu Hsin-tai (吳欣岱), convener of the party’s Taipei chapter, urged government agencies to curb Chinese propaganda.
Eslite yesterday on its Web site said that it would continue to boost its information security and regularly provide reminders about fraud to its readers.
Additional reporting by Ling Mei-hsueh
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS