CCP Influence Operations and Taiwan’s 2020 Elections

Voters in the island democracy of Taiwan will go to the polls to elect their president and representatives in the Legislative Yuan (national assembly) on January 11, 2020. The upcoming elections will determine whether the incumbent president from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will get the chance to see through her administration and party’s ambitious reform agenda or whether the country will change course – especially as it relates to ever sensitive ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The consequences of elections for Taiwan’s young democracy are significant and this is clearly not lost on the island’s neighbor across the strait. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long tried to influence the political process in Taiwan with a range of tools that have included firing missiles across the Taiwan Strait in an effort to intimidate Taiwanese voters in 1995-1996, as well as cyberattacks in subsequent elections. Over the past two decades, the CCP’s efforts to influence the political process within Taiwan have become noticeably more subtle and sophisticated, but no less destabilizing. A series of investigative reports and declassified government disclosures in recent years confirmed that the CCP is engaging in political warfare as part of a broader influence campaign against Taiwan – all with the goal to manipulate the island democracy in ways that will have implications well beyond Taiwan.

Political Warfare With Chinese Characteristics

Political warfare is a set of overt and covert non-kinetic tools that are used by one government to influence another’s policy calculus. These tools can also influence members of the target society’s perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. Beijing’s growing influence and the means of its influence in Taiwan have long troubled some national security experts on the island. The United States – whose primary concern had been the prevention of military conflict in the Taiwan Strait – has also become increasingly aware of and concerned about Chinese political warfare in Taiwan and its implications for peace and stability in the Western Pacific as well. In an interview with Reuters in April 2019, Ambassador James Moriarty, chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the de facto U.S. embassy on the island, sounded the alarm: “They’ve [China] obviously stepped up campaigns of disinformation and direct influence against Taiwan … I do worry greatly about attempts to influence Taiwan’s democratic processes and I believe many Taiwanese share that concern.”

Since 2018, the United States and Taiwan have consulted closely on how to combat the challenges emanating from CCP influence and information operations. The issue was the focus of an international forum co-hosted by the two governments on promoting “media literacy” in the Indo-Pacific region. As an indicator of their concerns, the U.S. and Taiwan co-organized a follow-up forum in September 2019 in the inaugural Indo-Pacific Democratic Governance Consultation. Deputy Assistant Secretary Scott Busby, of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, traveled to Taiwan to participate in that forum. In his speech, Busby highlighted the following:

We also are working to counter disinformation that seeks to undermine the credibility and outcomes of democratic elections. It is an ongoing challenge that the U.S. faces. Taiwan’s 2020 elections are just a few short months away, and China once again seeks to use disinformation to undermine the vote, divide the people, and sow seeds of doubt in the democratic system itself. China has invested heavily to develop ever-more sophisticated ways to anonymously disseminate disinformation through a number of channels, including social media. As their malign methods evolve, the motivation remains the same – to weaken democracy and end the freedoms that the citizens of Taiwan have come to enjoy after many long years of struggle.

Such statements reflect broader U.S. policy considerations that are featured in significant policy documents and intelligence assessments. For example, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s China Military Power Report (CMPR), released in January 2019, disclosed the agency’s official assessment that the PRC is conducting “political warfare” against the United States and Taiwan, among other countries. Moreover, in the latest mandated annual report to Congress on Chinese military developments, the Office of the Secretary of Defense stated that “China conducts influence operations against cultural institutions, media organizations, and the business, academic, and policy communities of the United States, other countries, and international institutions to achieve outcomes favorable to its security and military strategy objectives.”

The CCP is increasingly employing both military and non-military tools to influence foreign governments and societies to achieve party objectives. Chinese pressure and coercive tactics for political purposes involve the use of a full range of instruments: diplomatic, economic, and even military. The toolkit now includes the use of “sharp power” that utilizes propaganda, disinformation, and other information operations to undermine democratic institutions and exploit cultural institutions to affect political activities in ways favorable to the interests of preserving the absolute authority of the Chinese party-state.

These types of “malign influence operations” are both overt and covert, and also coercive or corrupt. While it is a fact that all governments engage in some form of influence operations, what distinguishes China is the nature of the regime and the specific types of malign behaviors.

Intensifying Political Warfare Campaign

It was clear early on that Beijing was unwilling to work with the Tsai administration. The CCP has actively worked to undermine Tsai’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives, which Beijing views as pushing independence, through external as well as internal pressure.

In the absence of high-level governmental dialogues, the PRC has intensified its political warfare campaign aimed at isolating the Taiwan government by suppressing the island’s international space, while directly interfering with the island’s political process by manipulating social and political tensions to subvert its democratic system.

As has been well documented in the public domain, the PRC’s overt measures include poaching Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, military and economic coercion, excluding Taiwan from international organizations, pressuring foreign corporations and Taiwan’s non-diplomatic allies, providing economic incentives, and other less conspicuous measures such as cyberespionage, traditional espionage, and political warfare.

Other analysts have observed that among the preferred tools in China’s political warfare toolkit are information operations that involve the use of propaganda and disinformation. There are many information layers through which China’s sharp power is “piercing, penetrating, or perforating the political and information environments” of Taiwan. Circumstantial evidence from Taiwan’s recent local elections support this assertion. Take Tsai’s main rival, Han Kuo-yu. As Paul Huang, an investigative reporter, meticulously documented in a detailed report for Foreign Policy, Han’s “rise from obscurity to superstardom had a little help: a campaign of social media manipulation orchestrated by a mysterious, seemingly professional cybergroup from China.” 

A self-identified spy for the PRC government who is attempting to defect to Australia recently confirmed in a bombshell public interview, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, that Beijing sought meddle in Taiwanese elections.

“In Taiwan, Mr Wang [the alleged Chinese spy-turned-defector] said his intelligence operation was in contact with media executives in order to influence Taiwan’s political system as part of a systemic election meddling campaign being waged by Beijing to topple candidates (including President Tsai Ing-Wen) considered hostile. He said his operation had backed presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

While it is difficult to assess whether the aforementioned measures had a direct effect on the results of the November 2018 elections, which saw Han’s surprising electoral victory in Kaohsiung, other anomalous activities identified in both traditional and new media outlets, including social media platforms, and other illicit activities monitored by Taiwan’s national security apparatuses, such as campaign donations to pro-Beijing candidates, closer to the elections suggest that Beijing was at least trying to shape the information environment. China appeared to do this by exacerbating social and political tensions, and even attempting to influence the elections through direct and indirect support of pro-Beijing politicians and proxy groups.

Information Operations in the Social Media Age

One of the most pervasive forms of CCP influence operations in Taiwan is spreading propaganda and disinformation through both traditional and social media channels. There is a growing volume of propaganda and disinformation circulating in Taiwan’s information space, some of which is the product of PRC “content farms.” These outlets generate “fake news” online that gets circulated through the bloodstream of Taiwan’s information ecosystem.

Against the backdrop of China’s intensifying pressure campaign against Taiwan, the country’s National Security Bureau (NSB) – the equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – confirmed that one of the sources of disinformation in Taiwan is local media that have been co-opted by China.

At a legislative hearing on May 2, 2019 about the influence of Chinese fake news on Taiwan, Lieutenant General Vincent Chen, who serves as the NSB’s deputy director-general, confirmed that CCP-directed media outlets, which Chen described as “fellow traveler media” – including online and print media, social influencers, and Facebook pages – are actively spreading fake news and disinformation on the island. Chen described the problem of China buying social influencers and fan pages as particularly severe.

In response to a question by a DPP legislator, Chen also confirmed that op-eds published by some local media were first being sent to Beijing for approval. A Financial Times report confirmed this account, citing media employees who claimed they were being censored by management, which may have been receiving direction from the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO).

A summary report provided by the NSB to the Legislative Yuan stated: “Through the specific content and direction of Chinese media in Taiwan or fellow traveler media, they engage in disseminating controversial messages that divide the hearts of the Taiwanese people and encourage other media to circulate the reporting.” More alarming, the NSB assessed that “some of the media’s propaganda content, reporting methods, channels, and tone were the same as the mainland’s threatening rhetoric against Taiwan.”

At the Jamestown Foundation’s 9th annual China Defense and Security Conference in Washington, DC, co-sponsored by the Global Taiwan Institute, Chen said:

The CCP has pursued a united front interaction and infiltration in Taiwan for decades, having reached quite widely and deeply in our island, developed a complex network with local government across the Strait as well as 24 business media and semi-official representatives in Taiwan... Some of them have engaged in activity beyond their publicly stated mission. There are at least 22 pro-China organizations, political parties, and we have identified a number of them with connection to organized crime for extending their networking to local temples, businessmen, youths.

Local restaurants in Taiwan have allegedly been paid to only play pro-China media outlets and hotel operators catering to Chinese tourists block access to certain pro-DPP media. Within its broader propaganda efforts, China is also investing in media programming companies and not just broadcasting companies; more importantly it is using United Front groups to amplify its propaganda and disinformation. Transmission of disinformation alone is not effective. While transmission “amplifies” disinformation, it has to be “legitimized” by traditional media to be effective.

United Front Supports CCP Propaganda in Taiwan

While not “covert” in the sense that it is “not openly shown, engaged in, or avowed” (at least not internally within China, since there is a good deal of literature on this topic in Chinese), the “United Front” concept is still little understood outside the world of Chinese historians and students of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union.

In the Chinese context, the United Front is a means of waging political warfare that involves the use of non-kinetic instruments that organize and mobilize non-CCP masses in pursuit of the Party’s domestic and foreign policy objectives. According to a declassified study conducted by the CIA, the United Front is a “technique for controlling, mobilizing, and utilizing non-Communist masses.” Indeed, since the CCP was founded in 1921, the Party has used the United Front as an organizing principle to establish a foothold among the masses, exploiting conflicts within society to undermine the influence of its adversaries, defeat warlords, gain support of the victims of Japanese aggression, and aid in the seizure of state power.

After forming the PRC government in 1949, the CCP has employed the United Front to shore up its domestic legitimacy and undermine threats to state security. CCP General Secretary and President Xi Jinping has described the United Front as a “magic weapon.”

According to a Taiwan government estimate, China spends at least $337.8 million per year on United Front recruiting efforts in Taiwan. This is likely a conservative estimate and there might be more “invisible funding.” According to one estimate, the CCP has invested around $10 billion per year projecting its influence into the politics of overseas democracies.

In the case of Taiwan, CCP political warfare and influence operations have a long history, particularly with and against the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT). In Taiwan today, the United Front targets a broad range of constituencies: pro-China politicians, retired generals and military officers, businessmen, aboriginals, farmers, fishermen, students and youths, religious organizations, village and township elders, and clan associations. Let’s examine retired generals, temple associations, and political parties as examples.

Retired Generals and Military Officers

On November 12, 2016, the founder of the KMT and Republic of China (ROC), Sun Yat-sen, revered in Taiwan as the “Father of the Country,” would have turned 150. Every year in both Taipei and Beijing, political leaders organize events commemorating Sun’s legacy. In an unprecedented move in 2016, Beijing rolled out the red carpet for the “revolutionary hero” in a high-powered ceremony attended by senior CCP cadres, which also included participation by retired senior military officers from Taiwan. That year’s politically charged ceremony was reportedly attended by more than 32 retired military officers from the Taiwan military, including Lieutenant General Wu Si-huai.

Wu served as deputy commander of the ROC Army from January to August 2011. After he retired from military service in 2011, he served as the deputy secretary general of Taiwan’s Red Cross Society and vice president of the ROC Army Academy Alumni Association. Wu has been a regular participant in an annual cross-strait dialogue called the “Zhongshan, Whampoa, and Cross-Strait Friendship” dialogue, put on by the PRC’s Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang Central Committee and the Whampoa Military Academy Alumni Association. The first of these annual events was held in Taipei in 2010, during the previous Ma administration.

In addition to targeting the military elites, Chinese information operations are also targeting the masses, including military veterans in Taiwan. At the height of the controversial pension reforms debate in Taiwan, which affected military pensions among others, LINE – the most popular messaging app on the island – and internet users reportedly began seeing a flood of messages and numerous websites that were circulated through fringe political and veteran groups such as the “800 Warriors” that falsely claimed that the central government was planning to impose draconian restrictions on pensioners. Alarmed by the potential instability that such rumors may cause in a society already on edge over the issue, the Taiwan government quickly issued a statement denying the news as fake.

Temple Associations

In the absence of high-level central level dialogue, Beijing is using local governments in an attempt to influence Taiwan’s central government. It is also using city relations with Chinese provinces, as well as through wards, schools, and farmers associations, family clan associations, and religious organizations.

Chang An-lo, the head of the Chinese Unification Promotion Party (CUPP, also known as the Unionist Party) – a fringe pro-China political party in Taiwan – claimed that there are around 30 heads of temples on the island whom are either members of the CUPP or its supporters. The former triad leader mentioned several temples by name.

In a detailed expose of the CUPP’s network, a Commonwealth Magazine report from 2018 found that CUPP “has more than 100 locations around Taiwan and over 30,000 members, had two people elected to village and town councils and two others elected as ward chiefs in local elections in 2014.” The report continued: “In 2016’s national elections, it received over 56,000 votes (about 0.5 percent of the votes cast) in the legislative party vote to determine at-large legislative seats.” The article also observed:

… the three main pillars of the Unionist Party are gangs, temples and overseas Taiwanese businesses. No party dues are required and only 50 party members are needed to set up a local party chapter … They are mainly linked together through temple groups around Taiwan. The White Wolf [Chang] serves as the spiritual leader, and because of his strong network of “red” (Chinese) connections, he is able to bond closely with influential local factions. [emphasis added]

Ongoing law enforcement investigations into whether Chang received financial contributions that were not reported in accordance with the law and suspicion over embezzlement and tax evasion had reportedly uncovered the CUPP’s activities with regard to temple associations. China and its proxies in Taiwan may be using religious organizations as a conduit through which Chinese money is being funneled into Taiwan and used for political purposes. This account was also suggested by the Chinese spy and would-be defector in Australia in late November: “Our work on Taiwan was the most important work of ours – the infiltration into media, temples and grassroots organisations.”

Political Parties

China is also using proxy organizations to spread propaganda in Taiwan such as through the CUPP, New Party – a Chinese nationalist political party in Taiwan – and other smaller political parties. These parties act as a go-between for China through temples, village and ward chiefs, university students, and young entrepreneurs, and also set up agricultural exchanges with China for representatives of Taiwanese farmers’ associations and agricultural production and marketing groups.

Three New Party members were indicted by Taipei prosecutors in June 2018 for spying for the Chinese government, in violation of the National Security Act.

A former candidate who ran for Taipei City Council and member of the Chinese Patriotic Alliance Association (CPAA, also known as the Concentric Patriotism Alliance), Zhang Xiuye, was recently indicted by prosecutors for having received and illegally using funds from China for political purposes. Zhang ran in last November’s local elections on the China Democratic Progressive Party’s (CDPP) ticket for Wanhua district in Taipei city. She concurrently serves as the secretary-general of both the CPAA and the CDPP. The Chinese Patriotic Alliance currently has about 200 members.

Taiwanese prosecutors charged Zhou Qingjun, president of the CPAA and chairman of the CDPP, with failing to obtain permission from the proper supervisory authority to raise funds from supporters on the Chinese Patriotic Alliance Association’s website. According to prosecutors, Zhang ​​received financial contributions in the amount of NT$179,000 (US$5,883.85) and RMB 2,000 (US$285.30). The prosecution also found out that Zhou and Zhang ​​received political donations from Zhou’s Hubei Tongxin Lianfa Agricultural Comprehensive Development Company in 2018 located in Hubei province (China) for the amount of NT$1.89 million (US$62,442.71). Zhang ​​had allegedly registered the funds for the CPAA’s operation, but used it for a campaign dinner celebrating the National Day of the People’s Republic of China and for her campaign for the Taipei City Council.

While there are straightforward cases of direct funding, which is easier for authorities to monitor and prosecute, the flood of Chinese money into Taiwan’s political space is much harder to stem given its scale and the multiple channels through which it can be transmitted. There are many indirect channels of funding, in-kind contributions, and signaling of where “public” donations should be contributed to that are much harder to identify, prove intent, and stop. This presents a serious challenge for law enforcement authorities trying to prevent such activities. And Taipei is unlikely to find a willing partner in Beijing to help them investigate these claims.

Creating Economic Dependencies to Reinforce Influence Campaigns

Reinforcing Beijing’s political warfare capacity are the economic dependencies that it creates through controlling access to its massive market and people. These dependencies allow the CCP to exert greater political leverage to propagate its narrative. In the case of Taiwan, Beijing has weaponized its millions of tourists by limiting the number of group tours as well as persons visiting Taiwan whenever there is a political impasse. Since 2015, Taiwan has received more than 10 million tourists per year, of which tourists from China have comprised over 30 percent. In 2017, even as the number of Chinese tourists dropped by around 700,000 from the previous year, Chinese were still 2.7 million out of a total of 10.7 million tourists in Taiwan. The drop hit hard the parts of Taiwan’s economy that had come to rely on Chinese tourists. China also remains the largest market for Taiwan, accounting for 40 percent of total exports and 23 percent of all agricultural exports.

In addition to punitive measures, Beijing is attempting to entangle Taiwanese people and businesses more deeply with the PRC’s economy through generous economic incentives. In February 2018, Beijing announced 31 measures aimed at providing equal – and in some cases preferential – treatment for Taiwanese persons and businesses operating in China. These include measures designed to incorporate Taiwan into the PRC’s “Made in China 2025” – a wide-ranging industrial policy aimed at moving the Chinese industrial base up the value chain. Other incentives include generous tax breaks for Taiwanese tech corporations, as well as equal intellectual property rights protection for Taiwan-owned legal entities registered in China.

Other measures include allowing Taiwanese persons to participate in the national “thousand-person program” – a CCP-managed project designed to attract foreign talent to help with the country’s national development goals. Most importantly, Taiwanese professionals are now eligible to apply for various state-provided funds for the promotion of science and arts. These measures are worrisome over the long term, since they could further exacerbate Taiwan’s “brain drain” and facilitate traditional espionage activities. And in early November 2019 – just two months before the 2020 presidential elections – Beijing announced another 26 preferential economic measures for Taiwan.

One specific channel of influence is through the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland (ATIEM). According to various estimates, there may be around 1 to 2 million people from Taiwan living and working in China. Founded in 2007, ATIEM is a business association consisting of around 300 Taiwan-funded enterprises and their members in China. The organization acts as a lobby group for Taiwanese businesses both in China and in Taiwan. According to a 2012 investigative report by Reuters, ATIEM previously tried unsuccessfully to lobby the Taiwan government to overturn a rule that bars citizens of Taiwan from taking positions in state or party bodies in China, such as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and National People’s Congress (as is being done with Hong Kong politicians and community leaders). It is instructive that in the lead up to last year’s local elections, a senior Chinese official encouraged Taiwanese businessmen at an ATIEM forum in China to go back to Taiwan to vote in the island’s elections.

Conclusion

The basic fact is that China is and has been interfering in Taiwan’s democratic political process for a long time. As U.S. Senators wrote in the opening paragraph of a letter to the executive branch in December 2018: “CCP attempts to erode democratic processes and norms around the world threaten U.S. partnerships and prosperity.” 

As China’s influence operations expand, the U.S. government has been on the alert about how CCP political warfare activities in Taiwan are being used as a playbook that it can apply to other U.S. allies and partners. This could undermine U.S. interests not only in Taiwan but elsewhere. With just weeks left until the Taiwanese people vote for their president and lawmakers, opinion polls from both the ruling and opposition-leaning media outlets are showing that the incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen, is currently the favorite to win a second term. Although one election will not determine whether Taiwan is successful in countering China’s malign influence operations in its democracy, it will serve as a telltale sign of what may be in store for the rest of the world.